[Bf-docboard] particles page

[Sascha]

*/"First off, great work!  I especially love the animation of the main 
step.  Any tricks to how to accomplish that?"/*

Well here is what I did, mostly with free software, but easily done with 
100% free software


I used hypercam 2.0 (free) to record a small area (zoomed out) using the 
lossless UT Video codec (also free) at about 20FPS, although you could 
just use your .gif's target frame rate.

I processed resulting video clip using adobe after effects (use virtual 
dub maybe?) and exported individual frames at a very low frame rate.

load all of the layers in to GIMP (file>open as layers), and *change the 
image mode to indexed*, use a small palette to keep file size down.
click *filter>animation>optimize (for gif)*. this step is very important 
as it crops out the unchanged pixels (within a box area) between frames. 
the size difference between optimized and non-optimized can be enormous 
if only a small part of the image changes each frame.
all that is left to do is save it. remember to specify the ms delay 
between frames to run the animation at the right speed.
the resulting animated gif will be very small. the one I uploaded was 30 
frames at a total of only 26 KB

it's a bit of work, but the results are well worth it, and it can help 
greatly to explain the process in certain topics.

use lossless recording if at all possible, it will just make the 
automatic .gif palette generation in gimp produce a smaller palette, and 
will just look nicer and be easier to work with than say, an mp4 recording?
a smaller palette may not reduce file size much, but it could cut down a 
bit in some animations. The most important thing is to optimize for gif, 
or wiki viewers will be loading several 400 KB files instead of a few 
tiny 26 KB files. If the animation has a lot of stuff moving, 
optimization won't help as much.




On 05/09/2012 3:45 PM, Kesten Broughton wrote:
> Hi sacha,
>
> First off, great work!  I especially love the animation of the main 
> step.  Any tricks to how to accomplish that?
> I've put my comments on the Discussion page and added a picture at the 
> bottom incase you find it helpful.  Discard it otherwise. (note, i 
> didn't follow proper naming convention for the pic, but not sure how 
> to edit it now).
>
> In general, i think you should add a few more details to your steps 
> (as outlined in my comments on Discussion).  This is especially 
> important if we are having non-expert reviewers, as it really slows 
> things down having to look up steps i'm not familiar with.  You can 
> either give details yourself or provide links (if they exist) to other 
> wiki pages that describe steps in more detail.
>
> I'm about half way done.  I'll try to finish it off shortly.
>
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Sascha_Uncia/Doc:2.6/Manual/Physics/Particles/Mode
>
>
>
> -- 
>
> Kesten Broughton
> President and Technology Director,
> Solar Mobile Trailers
> kesten at solarmobiletrailers.com
> www.sunfarmkitchens.ca <http://www.sunfarmkitchens.ca>
> 512 701 4209
>

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