How about a animated gif competition?

Recreation Fun & Games
1

I’ve always admired Dragonbones’ animated avatar, esp. because he did it himself. I’m certain there must be a few of us that can come close to his work using Beneton’s free animation software. How about it?

2

I’m down with it, but I don’t know about the free software. I’m learning After Effects now. So, if you put up links to the free software, I’d play.

3

Here’s a link to Beneton’s free animator:
download.com/Beneton-Movie-G … 66148.html

Other useful links:
Paint.net
download.com/Paint-NET/3000- … ?tag=mncol

Photobucket:
photobucket.com/

4

Thanks for the kind words, mate! I’m sure anyone who wants to can do it – I’d never done any animation before, and didn’t know how to when I started this. It really just took patience and trial and error. Here is the animation (as I don’t always have this avatar up):

and here’s the original still pic:

I also modified a few animated pieces for that infamous Hello Kitty love fest we had on Forumosa one year (spring 2005, I think it was), and did a Mexican flag waver. The latter may have been my first one, but they were all done around the same time. I recommend starting with something very basic like that flag waver, then working up.

Here are some mods I did and the originals:
Penguin waiter
mod
orig

Dragonbabe’s
mod
orig

lagerlout’s
mod
orig

My fave:
mod
orig

And another I did from a still pic:

5

Dragonbones, I wonder which tools you used to make yours.

6

I used Photoshop to create each frame manually, then used ImageReady (which used to come bundled with Photoshop) to put them together in series and adjust the timing, then I saved it in the Compuserve GIF format and uploaded it to ImageShack (they wouldn’t upload as animations to Flickr). ImageReady also had a function that would create intermediary frames for you but they came out blurry and unsatisfactory.

AFAIK ImageReady has been discontinued, and animation is now done with the Photoshop CS3 Animation window, which I’ve not yet tried. Sounds like a smart move, though, as toggling back and forth between Photoshop and ImageReady was clunky.

Oh, and for modding the files that were animated to begin with, I used something to strip the individual frames out – some freeware – but I can’t recall what it was, at the moment. I’ll check my old computer for that software the next time I can access it. EDIT: Might have been the demo version of Gif Movie Gear, but you can probably just Google for some freeware app that does this.

In Photoshop you can have a background layer (the cave) and then layers (like the dragon) atop it, so that when you move the dragon you don’t have to manually redo the cave behind it for each frame.

With a little patience, I’m sure y’all can do better than the ones I did above. It’s really fun, btw – but you do need to have a lot of time on your hands.