Topic awaiting preservation: Animated gif's using paths (Page 1 of 1)

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon Mahjqa's website and was browsing through his sigs, I've seen the dolphin one before and it always impressed me, I then found the tutorial that Mahjqa made for that dolphin, it uses another set of paths seperate from the dolphin shape to show the direction the 'dolphin paths' should follow.

I never knew gifs or indeed Photoshop could be so powerfull and I'd really like to find out more about this, does anyone know of any more tutorials of this kind, perhaps, mahjqa, you could tell me how you learn't this technique, and also does anyone know if this technique has a particular name or term?

Any help would be much appreciated.

TIA

Cheers,

I hadn't seen that tutorial before. Actually I think mahjqa has duplicated the path to have one for each of the 12 frames and moved, by hand, the control points to the position he had previously choosed when he did the prototype of the animation. It's a well known fact that he is crazy and not affraid to spend hours in PhotoShop.

I'm not sure I understand what you're aksing exactly, but it seems you may be misunderstanding what Mahjqa did.

The dolphin sig doesn't represent the power of Photoshop or of the .gif format really...it represents the power of mahjqa's creativity ant talent.

The paths are still drawn out by hand, and the animation is still created by hand...frame by frame (path by path...).

There's no magic 'animate path' technique that Photoshop will do for you.

Does that help clarify, or have I misunderstood your post?

Damn. I was typing out an entire post, and I see DL and poi have already explained it.

And yes poi, I AM crazy.

Anyway. I already made these anims to clear some things up a bit (I hope) about how I animate.

A lot of people make one mistake while animating, and that's tweening. Imageready comes with a nice function that takes the first frame and the last frame of an animation, and creates all the frames in between. (Hence the name, tween) If you have a ball that moves 6 centimeters (or inches, or pixels, whatever) between the two frames and you have 6 frames, the ball will move one centimeter each frame, like this. (I added the pixels to show the positions of the ball. Notice how they are all evenly distributed)



Well... it works. A bit. But the motion is very abrupt.

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(please scroll down, post will continue... I added this space so you hopefully won't have two bouncing balls onscreen at the same time)

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In order to create a smoother animation, the ball needs to start slowly, then accelerate, then decelerate again.



I also added a guide to show how I determine the positions of the ball. I take a circle with evenly distributed lines, and only take the vertical position of the points.

You can also see the guide dots I used for the dolphin in this image:



They are most obvious at the tail.

So yeah, animation realy *does* require that you pay attention to each and every frame.

(Edited by mahjqa on 11-11-2004 19:00)

Another gem for the FAQ ....

Right, that clears things up a little.

See I assumed that after creating your main image (using paths) you created another layer that would be invisible in the final product, but contained paths for the animation. Just like in Flash, you can create motion paths for tweening.

But you're saying that you did all this by hand right? You created a simple image that you used as a guide and then went through frame by frame positioning your paths from your main (animated) image. Am I getting this?

Correctomundo.