Crystal Ball (Animation) by Digimon

Bryce • Fantasy • posted on Feb 19, 2006

Open full image in new tab Zoom on image

Hover over top left image to zoom.
Click anywhere to exit.

Members remain the original copyright holder in all their materials here at Renderosity. Use of any of their material inconsistent with the terms and conditions set forth is prohibited and is considered an infringement of the copyrights of the respective holders unless specially stated otherwise.

Description

Hi gang!! As promissed in a previous post, I am re-posting some animations, as I have found better ways to compress them, which retain the quality much better. Here is one that I did early on, when I first started posting here, and it looks WAY better now. I also reposted my "The Summoning (Animation)", which now shows very few compression artifacts!! I have been asked by a few people how to convert animations to a GIF format that works here. It takes a lot of patience and "Tweaking", but here is a brief description of my process: Making GIF animations just requires a slightly different mind set. Because a GIF file only records the difference between one frame and the next, the more pixels "Dancing" or moving in your image, the larger the file. You will notice in all of mine, the background stays static. Also fewer colors = smaller, so many of mine are B & W or a limited palette. I also figured out a technique for eliminating "Dancing" pixels. "Dancing" pixels can happen if the software compresses the background, even a static one, and pixels dance from one frame to the next. Here is my process (Briefly) 1) Create your animation (In this scemario you output to QuickTime format) 2) Render without compression, best quality 3) Open animation in QuickTime, export frames as image sequence (No compression!) (Image format:Windows=BMP, Macintosh=PCT) put them in a folder named "Frames" 4) Open one frame in Photoshop, change color mode to index color/local adaptive (=256 colors). 5) Revert image to original 6) Create a new action (Macro) start recording: change color mode to index color/previous save to a folder (Create) named "FIN frames" , stop recording macro. 7) In PhotoShop go to file/automate/batch and run the action script I created, make sure it is pulling from the "Frames" folder, and saving to the "FIN Frames" folder, run macro 8) Re open one of the images from the "FIN frames" folder in Photoshop, use change mode/ color table/save to save out the act file (Palette) into a safe place. What this does is lets Photoshop reduce the palette to 256 colors, which Photoshop does a fabulous job of! Photoshop is essentially compressing the frames, but will NOT create "Dancing pixels"....usually.... Then you can bring these frames compressed to 256 colors (8-bit) by Photoshop into a GIF program like GIF Builder, and load the frames, then load the palette (act file) into the GIF program, play with the settings, and bang! You have an optimized GIF! There are many other factors, but this gives you a basic strategy for minimizing stray moving pixels. Color, size, size of moving area and overall size effect the final GIF size. Hope this is helpful! I am always free to answer Q's! ~ Peace ~ ; )

Comments (28)

)

Cosme..D..Churruca

12:08PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

It is perfect ! A captivating object really. Your info about how this it is done is like magic for me. Thanks anyway !

)

robotalk

12:15PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

a mystery sea inside --wonderful work..as for your process it is ingenious--but in the ulead gif animator you can simply 'optimize' the frames to '256 non destructive'--for that effect--to get a huge file '1600 mb' or so down however, you must 'lose quality' and go optimize to 128 or 64 colors ..then it's ghost world..but down to the 512 kb limit :-D

)

chimera46

12:31PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

Looks great, i'm going to use this to see my future!

)

jjean21

12:32PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

I love the rolling motion to this, calming and so relaxing. Would like one on my coffee table.

CameraObscura

12:38PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

Very informative Eric. I did not know that so much went into this. Both of us seem to want to compress the image of our own as much as possible but retain clarity and colour fidelity and beauty. Thank you for sharng this bit of information with us.

)

Digimon

12:49PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

You are correct Robo-san! There are many ways to acheive the "Goal", this is how I do it. I am sure there are better ways, and I keep looking!! I also mean to give an idea of the thinking behind the process, what things to look for/look out for.

)

Svarg

1:32PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

Great animation! And very informative as well. I've been thinking of doing a 'moving picture' or two myself and now I have the tricks of a master! Thanks!

Meowth

2:19PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

Thanks for the tutorial. I am gonna have to try it. I usually have too many dancing pixels for a decent animation. :)

Hopalong

2:52PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

An interesting technique, and one of many. In the larger context, compression itself is an artifact of this and other sites that have relatively smaller file limits, and has nothing much necessarily to do with "computer graphics" when they stand on their own. The further irony is that of the two files generally available on this and some other sites, JPG/JPEG, which is a difference file, has less claim to any artistic value of its own and apart from translation and compression than GIF, which has not only a longer and independent history, but many advantages in controlling precise color, as other bitmap files like PSD, BMP, various Corel Files, etc., etc. etc. This used to be more obvious years ago, when there were still comments about what a particularly good piece of CG would look like as a PSD, rather than as a translated JPG/JPEG, and if it had not needed compression of some sort to be posted in the first place. GIF, it is true, has the advantage of easy animation as well, but also of the active manipulation of many different artifacts under compression. In short, whatever the GIF is that you see it has a claim as presented as a GIF, even if a translation from another file type. All artistic media have artifacts, and all great artists have learned to manipluate them to advantage, rather than get rid of them in regard to the requirements of some other media. In short, I am inclined to take GIFs, animated and not, and translations from other files or not, on their own as an important CG medium, with or without the requirements of compression. JPG/JPEG notoriously degrade under translation or compression, but I have seen only a few play with that file type on its own and brilliantly make use of a compression artifact as part of a "final" image, presented here. "Orange Suppository" is a play on what degrading JPG/JPEG yields in the way of artifacts present as an animated GIF, but only a few got the joke. Photo-Shop is first class, but for GIFS the control of the final product available in Corel Photo-Paint is way beyond what is available in Image-Ready (which I used to use, and sometimes still do). It is a hilarious analogue that photographers have been laboring for years to airbrush out skin blemishes while Poser texturalists labor mightily to put them back in. So too with "lens flares", hehe. Whoosh....

)

Digimon

3:42PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

Good point Hoppy! I'm not saying you can eliminate compression artifacts, that comes with the reduction from 24-bit (Millions of colors) down to 8-bit (256 colors). There is bound to be artifacts. Controlling them is what I'm on about.

)

zoren

3:51PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

thanks for sharing your knowledge with others, as I have benefited myself from your generosities and hopefully, will continue to do so, with this type of dicourse....

)

DennisReed

4:11PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

Cool! Bravo!

)

Richardphotos

5:17PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

really a cool anim!!Eric. I need to learn animation for computer

)

jif3d

6:33PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

Thanx for all the tech-info, still there has to be another easier way to do this, after all it is "Beyond 2000"....we need a MEGA SUPER compression system that retains all the original qualities of the anim, but at a fraction of the size, not a big ask really...so come on all yea boffin's !!! ~Cheers~ :o)

)

lemonjim

9:35PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

thanks for the tutorial buddy, it really looks superb.

)

jocko500

9:51PM | Sun, 19 February 2006

thanks for the imformation super looking too

)

oscilis

4:13AM | Mon, 20 February 2006

How weird. I just spent an hour trying to animate a water scene. I see now that I am as thick as a plank as far as animation is concerned. Thank you for giving an idea of what direction to go in. Not that any of it makes any sense to me yet!

)

Burpee

8:47AM | Mon, 20 February 2006

Love the crystal ball and thank you for the animation compression info. You lost me at step one but I'm bookmarking this page. I'm going to do an animation someday and make you proud of me :) Thanks!

)

Forevernyt

9:34AM | Mon, 20 February 2006

Awesome animation!

)

soffy

9:50AM | Mon, 20 February 2006

woud be nice to have such a magical crystal ball :)love this Eric,excellently doneV

)

kimariehere

2:16PM | Mon, 20 February 2006

oh mann is that ever cool if i gaze into this long enuff will i see my futre hmm have to try. ok starred at it for 10 minutes the only thing i saw was that my kids wanted lunch .. lol..!!

)

Mea

9:23PM | Mon, 20 February 2006

The swirling sky reflected in the globe is really quite nice, and I like the brassy feel on the lions. Got a chance to compare it with the old one and this is a much improved version image compression wise. Looks good - glad you figured out a method that works for you. Getting anims up online can be a pain.

Traligill

10:32PM | Mon, 20 February 2006

I find this very peaceful and relaxing, great work!

)

TwoPynts

8:18AM | Fri, 24 February 2006

Awsome little ani and thanks for sharing your method. One question though...why not just let ImageReady create the animation? I guess whatever works for you... =] Well done!

)