I'm trying to have an animation with a gif, no background color - transparent, and a good quality.  I've tried several combinations but none seem to work well.

Carrara won't render a .gif with a transparent background. The usual trick is to make a colored background close to the background that the gif will be residing on  and then delete the background color frame by frame in a Photoshop or gifmaker. 

That said, transparent .gif files are always problematic because there will always be a "fringe" color around the objects unless you don't mind a truly pixelated edge. Gif files are soooooooo 1990's. :D

Mark

Thanks Mark, I agree, but unless I want to dive into Flash again, I don't know what to do.  I'd like a transparent character on my website: animated, "floating" over the page with a transparent backgrount.  Any ideas?

I'd render the animation frame by frame with alpha channel and make the gif in Photoshop or Gimp or a trial GIF Maker (or any other available utility that can link individual images into an animated GIF).

Would that work or am I misunderstanding the problem?

Quote - I'd render the animation frame by frame with alpha channel and make the gif in Photoshop or Gimp or a trial GIF Maker (or any other available utility that can link individual images into an animated GIF).

Would that work or am I misunderstanding the problem?

This is what I was going to suggest.  Just render to a .tiff or a .psd depending on what program you are going to use.  I made some animated icons this way using GIMP at the time.

in carrara the best way IMVHO: render to an uncompressed mov file, then open mov file in CS3 or later, then CSx has a buttload of options for saving anim.gif with transparent bg.  carrara doesn't have enuff gif options.

I feel like a dope.  What is CS3 again?  Corell Studio?  I really want to render some sweet gifs with transparent backgrounds...  or Flash if necessary.  My goal is to have an animated character with transparent background to add to a webpage. 

Thanks for the help!

cs3e = photoshop (with anim. and 3D options).

I'll look into it... photoshop. thanks!

Now to deal with the white glow...

Did you output fragment coverage render pass? It outputs the contour that you see as the white fringe here. Using it as a mask or for selection purposes you can easily delete the fringe from all the images.

I normally use it to get rid of unwanted edges in the alpha channel.

no... now I'm looking into what you suggested.  This is in the layers or when saved as a gif?  Does each frame of layer need a mask?  This is really getting into a photoshop questions...hope this is okay.  Can you explain in a little more detail Antaran?

This is a pass layer in Carrara, that usually renders as a separate image (I'm not sure whether it can be embeded or not). 

When you prepare your individual frames for combining in Photoshop, get rid of the fringe first, then add it as a layer for the gif animation. This way your layers in photoshop won't be dragging confusing maps around.

If you just want to alter the existing GIF, you will need a mask for every layer to consistently get rid of all the fringe.

Also, how are you aligning your layers in Photoshop?

Here is another attempt, and in a small size.

Thank you!

I think it's almost perfect now :) Good job!

Thanks!  I do want to get rid of the last bit of white, so I'm still playing with it.  I see what you are saying about cleaning off the white before creating the layers - again, thank!

I'm not getting the white edge on a transparent render with a white bg in APS using best transparent gif options.

maybe render of einstein needs to be fully transparent.

I can get rid of the white edge sparklers with a black matte, but ultimately the matte colour would be the page bgcolour, which wouldn't work if it's like this forum: users can select their own forum bgcolour.