Difference between revisions of "GIMP/C2/Easy-Animation/English-timed"

|Today we'll talk about  simple animation. The package of GIMP animation is called GAP or GIMP animation package which can do a lot about Animations, Films and Movies but we'll cover that later.  

| The oldest animations in Germany are called Daumenkio or Front Cinema. And in English its called Flip Book or Flick Book. This book contains a lot of images which are nearly the same but slide modifications from page to page and if you flick through them, you get  little moving picture.  

| I want to improve my advertise here. I want to show in my advertise the Meet The GIMP logo.  

|So now I steal my own image and save it on my desktop. I open this image with the GIMP.  

|Basically there is no animation in this image but there is a stack of eight layers in the layer dialog. And on the top you can see that this is a gif image which is indexed and has eight layers of 80 by 80 pixels.  

|This image is made out of 256 different colours. And to look at these colours go to Dialog and ColorMap.  

| 03.26

|So gif images are indexed and not rgb images and so they have only one limited colours available. Now let's look at the frames here. You can see that the 1st layer is named as background and in bracket it is in milliseconds i.e 5 Seconds.  

|So this image is shown for 5 seconds and then follows the frames 2,3,4 with 100 milliseconds and there is an option of replace. To see the frames I just press the shift key and hold and click on the eye here and all the other frames are made invisible. And now I can stack them on the top here.  

|There is a draw back of using the index colours. You can see lot of spots in here because these tile has only 256 different colours available.  

|To recreate this animation I have to take two images out of this stack which is very easy. Just click on the thumbnail here and hold the mouse button and draw it up to the tool box. And here is my 1st image. Now click here and this one here is my 2nd image.  

|So I have these two images here and I can close my original animation and I don’t want to save anything of it. Now I wanted to include the Meet the GIMP logo.  

|Just pull it over to the tool box and here it is. I have to rescale it down to 80 by 80 pixels and then I have to include white colour as my background because black would be too harsh with this image. And to do that I just add a new layer, fill it with white and pull it down and now I have white as my background.  

|Right click into the layer dialog and select Flatten Image. Now I have a flat Meet The GIMP logo on white.  

|And now the image is rescaled but it is way to soft. After rescaling you have to sharpen it. So I go to Filters, Enhance, Sharpen.  

|I think I should go fairly high with the sharpness. I think this is good.  

|Now I have 3 images waiting for becoming one animation. One thing I have nearly forgotten is saving these basic images.The 1st one is this here, Meet The GIMP and I Save it as mtg80.xcf.  

|And this one here too. Other way to access  menu is right click into the image and go to Image, Mode and RGB.  

|I’ll use this image as my base so I save it again and this time as the copy. And I call it advertise.xcf.  

|Yes I want to replace it, I have done that before. Go to File, Open.  

|So here this is my basic image. And the 1st thing I want to do is bland this image with Meet The GIMP Logo.  

|And for that I make a copy of this one and mix it with the logo. I select this image by clicking and pulling this into my tool box and here I have my layer and now I select the logo and pull it over to this image and you get a scrap layer which is untitled and it will never be saved. Now I have here two layers with my images. And I want to have 3 steps between these 2 layers. For doing that I choose a transparency of lets say about 25%.  

|Now I flatten this image and pull it to my advertise.xcf image. I'll change these names later on.  

|I go back to the untitled image, go to Edit and Undo. Now I set the transparency to about 50%.  

|And that’s it for this animation step. Now I have to pull the logo to this image and here I have my 1st 3 layers of blending.And now I just close the scrap layer here and don’t save it. Now we’ll look how this has worked out. But before that I save my work here. And now I go to Filters, Animation and Playback.  

| Here is my animation. I click on play.  

|You can rename the layers the same way as with lot of other image word processing option. Just mark the text, press Ctrl + C and double click on the next layer and press Ctrl + V and change the necessary stuff.  

|So I go back to my image select Filter, Animation, Playback and lets look at this here. You see the basic image.  

|It could be little bit slower. So I’ll change the timing to say 200 milli seconds.  

|I think this is better. The last thing to do is index this image and save it as a gif image. And this is easily done. Just go to File, Save As and then change the name extention to GIF and click on Save.  

|Then I get  an option dialog. And gif cannot handle these layers here. And it can only handle animation frames. So I want to save it as Animation.  

|GIF can handle only Grey Scale or Index Images and so i want to convert it to index result. These are the default setting I found they are good enough for my stuff and I can change it but I don’t think it's necessary. So I click on Export.  

|Here you see Created With The GIMP and Loop forever. In Frame disposal I want to replace frame from frame. And these other options are unchecked so I leave them unchecked because, if I want to change the timings to 5000 or 2000 milliseconds then i can do it. Now click on Save and we’ll look at the result. And for that we'll not use GIMP but Mozilla.