Animated Texture Help

Hey everybody. I'm trying to make an animated texture. It's on a 1024x1024 image, with 10x10 frames, 10 frames per second. When I upload it here:
http://www.peregrinesalon.com/anim/index.php
I run into the error as stated at the bottom of the page:
" - (rare) some GIF files look at the first frame, and then only save the pixels that change from frame to frame, instead of saving each frames entire pixel set. ImageMagick has problems with these."

This is happening to me. My image that I'm given is almost completely white. For some reason his converter doesnt like my gif. Is there any way around this? How did you go about making your animated gif?

Right now I'm recording small clips with wegame as .avi video files, converting them to .mpeg video files (Magic Video Converter), converting those to .gifs (Ulead Gif Animator 5) and then running those through the websites animated texture creator. It's not a problem with the amount of frames, I made sure to only have 100 in the entire gif before I saved it.

So, how would you go about recording small clips to upload into SL? Any suggestions?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

You could always just place the frames on the canvas by hand. Just divide it into a 10x10 grid, and put one frame in each square. Start at the upper left, and work in rows from there. The automated thingy on that website just saves you the whole minute ore so that it takes to copy and paste the frames into place.

You'll find, by the way, that going straight from your footage to TGA (or to any other 24-bit RGB format) will lead to much, much, much higher quality results over using GIF as your intermediary. GIF only supports 256 colors. AVI and TGA both support over 16 million colors.

Thanks for the help Chosen! I've still got a small problem though.

I've created a 10x10 grid, and I've managed to get my .avi to load as an animation inside photoshop CS3, just by opening it with photoshop. Had no idea I could do that!

So now I have to find out how to extract each frame with the photoshop animation editor. Saving it as a gif, and then using the automated web software, still renders same results. Lots of white spots in random frames. While it looks kinda cool, and actually almost fits the theme I'm using the animations for, It's a bit overkill.

If anyone has any experience with the photoshop animation editor, I'd love some help!

I'd still suggest you avoid using GIF althogether. Here's how I'd do it:

1. Open your video file in Photoshop, and resize it to the size you want each frame to be in SL. In this particular case, since you're dealing with 100 frames, we won't be able to go with the exact size we want quite yet, since there's no even way to divide 1024 by 100. Let's go with an image size of 103x103 for now.

2. Now resize the canvas to 1030x1030, so a 10x10 grid of frames will fit on it.

3. Open the Animation palette (Window -> Animation) to show the timeline.

4. Click the little icon at the upper right of the Animation palette, to show the palette's pop-up menu. Then click Flatten Frames Into Layers. You'll end up with 100 layers, each one a still frame from your video.

5. Turn on the grid (View -> Show Grid). Set its size (Edit -> Preferences) to 103. Make sure Snap To Grid is turned on (View -> Snap To -> Grid).

6. Now, click on the first layer, and then drag the image on the canvas into the first grid square, and snap it into place. Then click on the second layer, and snap that image to the second grid square.

7. Repeat the process for all the frames.

8. When you're done, resize the 1030x1030 image to 1024x1024, and upload to SL.


It's going to be a little tedious to drag all 100 frames into place, but it's only a few minutes of work, and the end result will be much better than going the GIF route. The full color gamut will be preserved, and you wont' have to worry about those white artifacts. It's also possible that a storyboarding program might be able to automatically place all the frames onto a single canvas in the right order, but I've never used one, so I don't know.

When I create animated textures for SL, I do it the way I just outlined.

Incidentally, I might suggest sticking with 64 frames or less, instead of doing the full 100. When you divide the canvas into 100 squares, each one is pretty small, so there's not much detail, and as I said earlier, the division is not even at the per pixel level. At 64 squares, at least you get 128x128 to work with in each one. That's not huge either, but it's generally enough for a decent looking video, and the math works.

Chosen, you are a GENIUS! You've helped me many times on this forum, I couldn't thank you more. I've had a headache for about 4 hours today trying to figure out...basically what you've just explained to me. Thank you SO much...do you accept tips? haha. What you outlined was PERFECT, I'll deffinately be working on this tonight after I get some food/water in me to clear up this massive migraine. I'll have to link an example Hell, maybe even a video tutorial to help others in the future.

You're awesome, thanks AGAIN!