GIF animation to TGA grid layout?

I want to be able to do GIF to TGA conversion by hand instead of relying on Flipper's Animation converter tool.
I did ask Flipper for his missing tutorial but he said it was misplaced/buried, etc.

Would someone mind telling me step by step how to layout my timeline images on a grid?
For instance I need to know

1. What file size to make the TGA;
2. What grid do I use
3. Where exactly do I place these images on the grid, or does it matter?

And any limitations involved.

sincerely, Raven

As with all textures, the smaller the better. Basically, figure out how big you want each frame to be, and multiply by the number of frames. For example, if you've got 16 frames at 128x128, then your texture could be 512x512 or 256x1024.

Just decide what is the most efficient configuration for the job, and work from there. There's no magic to it.


In Photoshop, go view -> Show -> Grid. Then go Edit -> Preferences -> Guides, Grid & Slices... to set the units for the grid lines. For easiest results, set the units to the size of one of your frames. For the above example, that would be a grid line every 128 pixels. Set the subdivisions to one.


Place them in the order of the timeline. Frame one goes in the upper left corner, frame two immediately to the right, frame three to the right of that, and so on. When you get to the end of a line, start the next line again at the left. For example, if you're doing a 4x4 configuration, frame 5 would be the start of the second line, frame 9 would start the third line, and frame 13 would start the final line.


Power of two considerations apply, just as with any other texture. The more frames you have the lower the maximum resolution of each one. Make sure you understand the order of the variables in the texture animation script so you can set it for the number and configuration of the frames you have.

you could line each frame up by hand or you can use software ...

Gif to grid tool

if your source material is in uncompressed avi format (which programs like animation shop export to) you can use something like avi 2 bmp

if neither will do export an animations frames to individual images ... then you can use something like image magic to arrange those on a single image grid format with a single command line (ie imagemagik -mosaic input folder output image.bmp)

PS
let me add somethng about avi 2 bmp , ... is a squerrly lil homebrew program, and on my computer if i dont run the program with its window maximised it screws up 100% of the time
with the application window maximised it works flawlessly

just FYI

Cool. All these little toys I didn't know about. Thanks Osgeld. I've been doing this by hand for years now, hehe.

I hadn't heard of the ImageMagick tools -- can't wait to try it out.
Chosen, your tutorials are superb.

Thank you both for the invaluable information.