Planet Geek

Animation with GIMP, and a new icon

Geekitude

I've been thinking about learning how to make animated GIFs. They're super-popular on Livejournal and other forums, so why not figure out how to put it all together?

Turns out The Gimp has a very simple mechanism for making animations. Just open multiple images in layers, and then save it as a GIF. When you go to save, it'll pop up a dialog "This has multiple layers, and you're saving as a GIF. Do you want to animate all the layers as frames?"

And that's it! So, naturally, I had to try it out. I needed an icon for gaming, and this seemed easy to put together. It's 27 frames, took me about an hour to draw the pieces, and then another hour of fiddling with GIMP to get the timing and assembly correct. Mad props to blk for figuring out that if you re-open an exported GIF, you can edit the timing on the frames just by altering the name of the layer (which is TOTALLY screwy in my book, but whatever).

Folks are welcome to scarf it and use it as much as they like. A pointer back to the blog here would be nice, but not required. :)

Posted by dbs at February 23, 2008 10:54 PM