I can make moving GIFS in Photoshop for the web BUT--

what is the method used in SL for creating flashing signs and objects similar to a gif animation outworld, In SL?

I use LSL function llSetTextureAnim with frames set to match how I have laid the individual picture out in Photoshop.

See http://rpgstats.com/wiki/index.php?title=LlSetTextureAnim for details on this LSL function.

For example...

See this picture here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7759984@N05/2538307272/sizes/o/

This is a 1024 x 512 canvas with four 256x256 horizontal pictures, and two 256x256 vertical pictures.

Where...

llSetTextureAnim(integer mode, integer side, integer x_frames, integer y_frames, float start, float length, float rate);

..the x_frames parameter would be set to 4 (horizontal) and the y_frames to 2 (vertical)

A typical llSetTextureAnim instruction for this might be...

llSetTextureAnim(ANIM_ON | LOOP , 0, 4, 2, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);

Hope this makes sense, but if not is might be best to take it to the scripting forum. It is actually easier to do than it might sound!

GIF animation and SL texture animation operate on slightly different principles. Both utilize frames, but the arrangement of those frames in time and space is completely different. I'll explain.

GIF, as you know, takes a timeline based approach. All the frames are in the same spatial location, and to switch from one to the next, you step forward or backward on the timeline.

SL texture animation, on the other hand, doesn't use a timeline at all. Instead, the approach is like that of a filmstrip or a storyboard. The frames are arranged in order on a single canvas, and the then playback is done via script in-world. The script causes just a portion of the canvas to be displayed at any given moment, in the same way that a film projector causes just one portion of a filmstrip to be displayed at a time. It steps through the frames by changing which portion is displayed from moment to moment.

Here's a quick example of how you might set up an animation of a bouncing ball:



Play that back with the appropriate script, and you'll see a red ball appear to bounce up and down inside a black box. For more on how the script works, you can go to the link Debbie posted, or you can go to relevant page the official SL script wiki: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetTextureAnim

Note, the example image I laid out here is very over-simplified. It's just 8 small frames (each 64x64), on a fairly small canvas (512x64), sized to best fit the format of this forum. Longer animations on larger canvases are certainly possible. On a 1024x1024 sized canvas (that's SL's maximum allowable texture size), you could have up to 128 frames of the same size as the eight in my example. In that case, you'd go with 16 rows of 16 frames each.

That frame size is rather small, though. If you want something more "normal-sized", like 256x256, then your maximum number of frames would be 16 (four rows of four frames each).

Check out this website .

http://www.peregrinesalon.com/anim/