Nihonomaru Anime Network - Tutorials http://forum.nihonomaru.com en Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:18:41 GMT vBulletin 60 http://img1.nihonomaru.com/forum/images/nihonomaru/misc/rss.jpg Nihonomaru Anime Network - Tutorials http://forum.nihonomaru.com Simple Signature Tutorial http://forum.nihonomaru.com/tutorials/147464-simple-signature-tutorial-new-post.html Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:45:16 GMT A simple tutorial (myfirst) I did a long time ago :P Fractal: http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s66/rylsteven/2zrhsom.png Tutorial: Image:... A simple tutorial (myfirst) I did a long time ago :P

Fractal:
http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s...en/2zrhsom.png


Tutorial:


CnC welcome!
Enjoy! :) ]]> Tutorials Jedge http://forum.nihonomaru.com/tutorials/147464-simple-signature-tutorial.html Tips for animated sigs http://forum.nihonomaru.com/tutorials/147251-tips-animated-sigs-new-post.html Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:05:22 GMT Post questions about animated sigs here; answers will be added to this first post.

(I hope this doesn't come off as too pretentious, but people do ask me about it from time to time so I thought it'd be easier to just load up my answers in one thread so I don't have to retype them again and again)

What program(s) do you use?

If you want to be super oldschool and draw each frame individually, use your favorite program; it doesn't really matter.

For greater ease of producing interesting, smoothly looping effects, I use Adobe After Effects. I strongly recommend learning it if you want to do any sort of animation, whether for sigs or otherwise.

I don't have any tuts on making sigs in it, but you should check out CreativeCow and VideoCopilot for some very nice video tutorials on using After Effects.

How do you save high quality gifs?

My process to save high quality gifs from AE:
  1. get your animation looking nice (obviously)
  2. file>export>png sequence [this creates a .png image for each frame of your animation]
  3. boot up PS
  4. file>scripts>load files into stack [this will take your pile of .pngs and make each of them one layer]
  5. select all the layers in the layer dialogue; layer>arrange>reverse. [.gif reads your layer/frames from bottom up, but the script will have placed them the opposite way. sometimes this doesn't matter, sometimes it does; I do it all the time just as a good habit.] Save as a new .psd
  6. boot up GIMP [you can also use Adobe Fireworks, but I use gimp; it's free and I find it more intuitive for this, plus I use it for some other things as well. if you want it, it's available at http://www.gimp.org/] load your new .psd
  7. image>mode>indexed. you may have to undo/redo this with different options a few times to get the best results, but most often optimum palette with 255 colours and Positioned dithering is the best. don't enable dithering of transparency.]
  8. filters>animation>optimize for gif. this will make a second window with a better filesize-optimized image in it, and rename the layers to indicate the framerate (normally 100ms/layer, if there are frames that stay in place for longer, it will remove the extra layers and just leave one with a longer time delay)
  9. save as an animated .gif. I purposely keep my animations to 20fps, so here I tell it to force the layers to 50ms/frame (which works out to the same thing). .gif only allows for multiples of 10ms/frame, so choose your framerate in AE accordingly (30 fps works out to 33 ms/frame, so you could round it to 30 but it will speed things up slightly)
  10. all done. you now have an animated .gif with little to no drop in quality or smoothness.

How can I reduce the filesize?

In terms of keeping filesize down, you can do a few things:
  1. keep it short! fewer frames means fewer kb. I usually make my animations a 2s loop
  2. keep it simple! the less movement/change there is in each frame, the less information goes into each frame, the lower the filesize is. Big movements, animation all the way across the sig and complicated cloudforms will generally bump your filesize quite quickly.
  3. keep it small! If you're still just a few kb over your desired filesize, try scaling it down a few px. Especially with animations that don't fit with 1 and 2, this can help.
  4. desaturate! I said to index it to 255 colours, but if you can simplify it so it looks nice with 128, you'll drop the filesize to a quarter what it was. You might not want to do monochrome all the time, but reducing colours will help you have complex animations that load nice and fast for everyone.
]]> Tutorials toadvine http://forum.nihonomaru.com/tutorials/147251-tips-animated-sigs.html