You have all seen the nice animated gifs in our wiki (if not go here) they make the wiki look dynamic and very cool. I have been asked how I made those, so I thought I'd make a little How to... So here goes. The program I use is GIF Movie Gear by Gamani (www.gamani.com). You can buy the program there for just $29.95. One other program I use is FRAPS (www.fraps.com). Ones you have both programs installed on you computer you need to make a little movie of the thing you want the animated gif of. If you choose to make an animated gif from and item info screen (like the one in the example, get the item info in game and make sure you have a rotating item, then press the button on your keyboard that is the shortcut for making a movie, it's the Pause/Break key for me but you can change that to whatever button you like in the FRAPS options. Now make sure you capture a full rotation at least. For ALL item info screens that's about 12 seconds, but to be sure make it 15 or 16 seconds. After those seconds press the shortcut again to stop capturing. A little movie is now added to the Output folder of FRAPS (C:\temp for me but you can change that in the options). Now comes the fun part. Open GIF Movie Gear and open the movie you just made (you can drag it in of choose open and brows to it). The program now starts calculating all the frames, this takes a while. Sometimes after you have done a few of these without closing the program you get a message that you are out of memory, just close the program and start it again and you should be OK again). After the program is done calculating the movie you will get a big list of all the frames. The amount of frames depends on the length of your movie. Now we need to crop the movie so we only have the item info screen. Click Animation in the menu bar and choose Crop. In this screen you can drag the grips to the side of the item info screen to mark the area you wanna crop. You can also zoom in to work more precise. After you marked the area click OK. You now get a list of all the frames, but now cropped. The next thing to do is remove the not needed frames. What we need to do is keep the frames that make 1 complete rotation of the item. I have done the work for you and found out that every item in the item info screen needs 600 frames to make 1 rotation, so remove all the frames past frame 600,, so 601, 602, 603 and so on. You can just click 601 press and hold the shift key on you keyboard and click the last frame to select them all. Now press Delete and we are left with 600 frames. If we would now save the animated gif, the file size would be to large to use in the wiki, so we have to put the image on a diet. To do that we let the program remove some frames. To do this click Animation in the Menu bar and choose Thin (reduce frame count). This will reduce the amount of frames by half, do this a second time so you end up with 150 frames. The final step is to optimize the animation This will remove all the pixels that do not change between 2 frames and will same about 50% (or more) of the file size. Now save the file according to the standard we come up with: iteminfo_<full ingame name>_<number> and you are ready to upload it to the wiki. You can add an animated GIF to the wiki just as you would with a regular image, BUT making a thumb of them will make them stop rotating.
Well how cool is that! Thanks for putting that together Razer, I'm going to have to try that out for sure. You DO know that you are about to crate an expansion of the purple monster, right? :D
I tried this but when I come to optimizing it will remove almost all of my figure (RXunit) just some sporadic dots left so you can actually see what it is supposed to be :/
that should be OK, it only keeps the pixels that changed, the pixels that are the same as the frame before are removed, this way the image is much smaller in size. You should still have the same animation but just smaller in size. If you look at this pic, it shows the same dotted images
dont go overboard on animated gifs, it can totaly bog up ones processor if u need to do larger animations i sugest using flash instead :)
ahh ok thanks :) Just tried on this for fun John, dont see a use for a animated gif of a normal girl really ;)
true, but you will need to build it from scratch, these animated gifs you can make form a movie captured with FRAPS and you don;t have to build anything. As you might have seen we use them in our wiki pages to give them a little movement. Weapon:EWE EP-40 Mercenary, Modified - EntropiaPlanets Wiki - Information about Entropia Universe
