My TG Sequence

[hmmm!]

Hey, fun work on the GIF flango! Glad to see you're still enjoying that sequence! 'Twas an enjoyable pleasure. And I have to agree with those who've said they like the slower wink better.

[flango]

Originally Posted by TrunKated

Your drawing style is great!

I didnt draw it, Hmmm!! did

And thanks for the compliments guys. Will try to do some more, plus if you lot want one done, send me a sequence of you getting any process done and i'll give it a shot

[Very_Good_Karma]

First of all, compliments to Hmmm! on the sequence; it's both technically excellent and in a cheerful style I really enjoy.

Secondly, flango, thanks for sharing the GIFs! I think that animation of your avatar winking has a lot of potential. It kind of looks like you gave every frame the same duration, though- you could improve it immensely by telling your gif animator to leave the tounge frame up longer. Also, it shouldn't be too hard to fix that 'shakey camera'.

[Very_Good_Karma]

Ugh, I got a little carried away with this. I'm still an amateur with GIF animation, but it's one of my few art skills, so I started poking at your animation, and I ended up polishing it a little bit to show you what I was talking about. Sorry if I'm imposing.

Your file says it was made with a GIF Movie Gear demo; does the demo give you timing controls? I'm working with a ten year old version of Microsoft GIF Animator, but I've found it's pretty solid.

[Ran]

Flango *is* the animator (not said in a harsh way). Anyways, I have to say I always liked that sequence, and it works nicely giffed up.

Anyways, flango, if you could give the Test-0 rendition of two memes merged here: http://test-0.deviantart.com/art/Ran...uence-59175567 an attempt I would be flattered. Not sure how you could get it to work coherently unless you split it into body sections though.

[genderhazard]

Forgive my technical ignorance, since these images are very close together, wouldn't morphing prolong the process and assist with the frames per second to give the gif a more fluid rather than flip book appearance?


I ask not only for theses sequences but perhaps a collaborated effort using the strength and weaknesses of each of these programs to create better process.

[Very_Good_Karma]

Genderhazard are you talking about flango's winking animation or his GIF of [Hmmm!]'s original sequence?

If you mean the winking animation- I have never seen a reference to using a morphing program to generate transitional frames for a traditional animation; it's an interesting idea but I suspect it would look very weird or very smudgy.

If you're talking about taking the four stages from [Hmmm!]'s original sequence and morphing each one into the succeeding one, that might produce something interesting; but generally that sort of morphing technique looks bad as a result of heavily leaning on the 'key frames'- you get sort of a butter-on-a-frying-pan effect. Plus, [Hmmm!]'s sequence of flango isn't really suitable for morphing because the pose changes; the morphing program wouldn't animate the arms going behind the back, it would morph them out of existence.

[genderhazard]

The wink is a two frame animation the gif works good for that, excellent work BTW.

I was initially talking about the original sequence. Frames 1 and 2 looked close enough that I thought a morph might work.

I could see that the arm position between frames 3 and 4 would not morph well.

Here, different arm positions and facial expressions done on different layers turned on and off to save pencil mileage might work.

Hmmm! sequence of Flango is nice, but may be off enough to make what I'm thinking about too rough or unworkable.

But I more had an eye towards a future project perhaps a group effort.

My understanding is Hmmm! is accepting commissions. So I was wondering more along the lines of using various tools to produce a process effect.

I don't know if you can mix morphs and Gifs

Morph to make a jaw line smoother, Gif to have a earing appear.

Morph to have breast expansion Gif to have a button pop or nipples perk up.

That sort of thing. Drawings could be created to work within the limitations/advantages of each and assembled into a complete package.

So would this be fairly easy to accomplish?

[flango]

Thnaks everyone, I appreciate your compliments. I only used Paint and then a GIF animator I found online, so nothing fancy

Ran- I'll give it a shot for ya, but cant promise it being smooth

Karma- I like your version, but you missed the tounge out, which I'm gonna extend on my version when I get some time

[flango]

Here we go Ran, hope its alright

Plus, I edited the wink

[Very_Good_Karma]

Flango- Actually, I did a version with the raspberry first, but with the tounge only being in one frame I felt it was still too choppy and edited the tounge out in paintshop. See below for that version. More power to you if you can manage a transitional frame for the tounge; I felt the image was too small and fuzzy to show it clearly.

Genderhazard- The wink is not a two frame animation- It has three transitional frames just for the eyelid, which I think Flango all made himself. The winking animation I posted has eight frames all together, and the one below has nine.

I'm not clear on how much you understand about animation in general, and I was trying hard not to patronize in my post- but maybe I should be more thorough.

Originally Posted by Genderhazard

...since these images are very close together, wouldn't morphing prolong the process and assist with the frames per second to give the gif a more fluid rather than flip book appearance?

A GIF animator program strings together a series of GIFs and makes them a single file, which web browsers then display sequentialy. The user can determine the length of time each frame appears. This means that an animation with five frames can last 5 seconds or .05 seconds.

The smoothness of the animation depends on how many frames you show per second; to give a 5 second animation more frames-per-second, you need more frames total, showing finer stages of the same action over the same length of time. I am assuming your idea is to use a morphing program to generate those additional frames. Using the word 'prolong' kind of threw me off, but I guess you were refering to the tendency of people making process sequences into animated GIFs to make those GIFs run really fast- they don't actually have to do this. My animation below has fewer frames than Flango's original- it just stops on one frame for 4 seconds.

Originally Posted by Genderhazard

I don't know if you can mix morphs and Gifs

GIFs are limited to 256 colors, but a decent graphics program will reduce the color depth of any digital image and convert it to GIF format, with varying results- and any set of GIFs with the same dimensions can then be strung together into an animated GIF. You can also export the frames of a video as stills and then convert those to GIFs, and then animate them. Morphing programs to my understanding generally output video files, but it shouldn't be hard to get a set of stills from one.

Composing animated GIFs is extremely easy- people use them because they are versatile and portable- but they are not a great medium for quality.

If you are looking to commision someone to make a quality animated sequence, you will probably get a much better final product working with Adobe Flash; Flash's vector graphics are ideal for showing smooth transformations. I don't know how many flash artists hang around The Process, but Smith 6x7 might be a good place to start- he has animated other people's sequences many times before, and maybe he can recommend someone else if he's not interested.

Meanwhile, I'm going to go look for a free morphing program.

[flango]

I like that version, Karma