GIF Animation Tutorials -- Getting Started
Getting Started
Creating GIF animations is, in some ways, like creating other digital art. You fire up your imaging software of choice and create an image... or, in this case, many images. What you also need, though, is another program that'll enable you to put your images together so that they form the frames of an animation.
There are a number of animation packages available ranging in cost from free to quite expensive. I won't talk about them all, here, or even about a lot of them. This is not because I necessarily favor one over the others, but because I haven't had the time or the opportunity to use them all. Most of the ones I've seen are pretty similar and, whichever one you use, you should be able to follow along just fine.
The software I'll be using, at least for now, is Gamani.com's GIF Movie Gear. You can download a free trial version at
Gamani.com and you can read our
GIF Movie Gear review here.
The real work in creating an animation is not dependent upon the animation software. It's more dependent on you designing a string of images that, when strung together, will form the frames needed to create an animation. Whether you create these images/frames in Photoshop, Corel DRAW!, PSP, a combination of these (as I often do) or in a 3D rendering program, as I did to create the spinning logo in figure 1.1, doesn't really matter.
figure 1.1
Animations have become a pretty hot topic on the Web. At one time I'll admit that I wasn't really interested in designing animated GIFs, and many of the animated GIFs I saw on the Web were pretty cheesy. This has changed a lot, though, as new tools have been developed. In fact, if all you need is to animate some 3D text, you might want to check out
Xara's 3D software. I have also written
a review of Xara's 3D software that you might want to read.
One problem that'll rear its ugly head is the final size of your animation. Even by optimizing the GrafX Design logo (seen above in figure 1.1) and cutting the number of colors down to just 32 I wasn't able to get the filesize below 40kB. Unfortunately, cutting down an animation is often just a little difficult. There are many factors involved like the number of frames, redundant pixels, color depth and more.
Actually, the spinning logo started out as a much larger file. I cut many frames from it which really reduced its size. The final image is not nearly as smooth as the original, but it's a lot smaller. Gamani.com's GIF Movie Gear heplped me squeeze in the most image for the least bytes, though.
At this point I hope you'll pick up a GIF animation package from the Web and continue on with our
That's it