Help me make an animated GIF avatar!

Benvox2 on 11/9/2008 at 09:42

Hey all,

Heres what I wants, I wants for an avatar just a plane say stone wall, and then i want a shadow to move accross the wall from right to left then just loop over again, it sounds simple but i only just got Ulead GIF Animator and was wondering if anyone could please help me out.

Thanks!

D'Juhn Keep on 11/9/2008 at 11:06

I recently used (http://www.gifninja.com/CreateAGif.aspx) this site to make this:

Inline Image:

http://www.backdrifts.co.uk/goose.gif

It was pretty simple, though I was obviously using images I'd taken photos of, rather than drawing my own images. Though I'm sure you can manage the drawing part. That site can only take 5 frames though. If you need more there's also (http://animageek.com/) this site that I also used once.

demagogue on 11/9/2008 at 13:31

I made this little bon mot for Digi's (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1763534#post1763534) birthday.

Inline Image:

http://i37.tinypic.com/2r5x7xl.gif

I just started with a simple idea; didn't know it was going to turn out quite so cinematic, lol. But once you start going it's fun to put these together.

I used Paintshop's animation shop but I'm sure they're all the same. You just start a new project, it gives you the cells right in front of you, and you just drag each drawing into each consecutive cell one by one.

You'll want something like Photoshop open at the same time to tweak each drawing as you go. Either draw your wall by hand or use a photo/drawing source. Keep a master copy, then a new copy for each consecutive movement of the shadow, which you can probably best do with something like the lasso tool in the shape of the shadow and and a brightness filter set to a darker setting inside the selected lasso. Use layers if you want a figure over the background; make the figure in a separate file then cut it out with the lasso and put him in a master file, then paste as a new selection over the background when you need him.

Then edit each cell's properties for the delay, play it back a lot of times and tweak the timing and drawings to get it looking fluid, then save it up with the "repeating" tag checked, and that's really it.

Nameless Voice on 11/9/2008 at 15:52

If you have Photoshop CS or later, then you also have Adobe ImageReady.
Just make your animation using Photoshop layers (e.g. one layer for the background, and one layer for each frame of the shadow's animation), and then File->Open in ImageReady. (Note that this closes the file in Photoshop, so if you close it in ImageReady without saving, the file is lost.)

Then, just insert the desired number of frames, and turn the layers you want on or off for each frame.

jtr7 on 12/9/2008 at 02:39

Something like this, Benvox2? I went to the first link D'Juhn Keep provided. That's obviously only five frames, and I see that the shadows are hardly transparent unlike the originals...

Inline Image:

http://www.gifninja.com/Workspace/70372ecf-0926-4218-94aa-944fdb8e2699/output.gif