Here's a new tutorial for you GAPer's out there! http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/38236792/



This is just a thumbnail version of the outcome. Fullsize is a bit much to show on the web.

The tutorial format is in html (complete with all the screenshots/narrative) so you can download it to your computer, and review at your leisure.

Looking forward to seeing your results!

Art

If you've already downloaded the tutorial, you may have trouble with the images showing up. Please try again. I think I've fixed the problem. Sorry about that.

Art

Nice results. Being a big GAP fan myself, I will be trying out this tutorial soon. Thank you very much for posting. :h:

I had to fix this thing one more time because of an image not showing and I included a copy of someone's sig in place of my stock image. Congrats to me! I win the dufus of the day award! Yeah, ME! *shakes head in disbelief*

I was able to cut it down to 20 frames and at a final image size of 200x150 it is still almost a megabyte in size. I prefer a larger number of frames since it makes the animation smoother. However, it ends up being a balancing game and up to personal preferences. A larger amount of frames when doing video makes for a smoother motion. Here is my result:


The background image is from a local scene that I took a snapshot of a few winters ago.

Once again another excellent tutorial fencepost. Thank you very much. :h:

I am thinking of trying this tutorial using a larger snow image so I can use GAP to make the snow move side to side and at angles giving it a wind blown effect as well.

Edit: OK, I got this down to 10 frames running at 10 frames/sec and sized at 200x150 it is 352K. The 400x300 gif file was a little over a megabyte. Here it is for comparison:



Personally, I prefer the larger number of frames since it makes for a smoother animation, but in very small images such as I posted, a small number of frames would work also.

Nice work! Yeah, ClayOgre and I discussed the possibility of adding other elements (larger flakes, different framerates, etc.) Those are all great ideas and hopefully, this tutorial will give people enough to work with to add those elements. Knowing your other works, you won't have a bit of trouble adding those other things. I'm looking forward to trying this in a video format (now that I can get stuff to convert to video in Windows! At least part of the time! :w: I owe you big time for the suggestions there!) Might want to try incorporating Clay's "progressive destruction" example in the gallery to give the appearance of wind-driven snow! That would be cool!

Glad you liked the tutorial and thanks for the comments.

Art

wow this is a greatr tutorial. thanks alot. here is my result:


original one:(veryy big)
ftp://s2.up-file.com/finalproduct.gif

Wow! I'm impressed! I'm guessing that since you were asking about where to download and how to install GAP this was your first time using it? That's cool! Glad the tutorial helped a newbie to GAP. :l:

yeah i wanted to get GAP just so I can try this tutorial, and its amazing. Thanks again.

I tried your tut and everything was going good till I got to the "Move Path" part. In the "Source Image/Layer" I only had one to choose from. It had the "snow.xcf-##/Background-#### but they were different #'s than the one listed on your tut. I saved them with the same file names as you had yours. I didn't know if that part made any difference or not. Now when I went to "Anim Preview Mode" the layers didn't change. I tried to move on incase it would work later but when I got to this part "Video Menu > Frames to Image" I had an error message show up. I just installed GAP so I don't know if it is that or me overlooking and messing something up. I'll try to do it again and see if I catch anything I might of missed especially if everyone else is having luck.

I finally got it figured. I kept putting the 300 in the wrong spot in the "Move Path".

What is the least amount of frames you can use for it to look good?

thank's for the tut


that was the 1st time you used gap

and i now understand it a bit better

what i did with it

I just finish to watch "metropolis" (the animation movie) and there were a lot of coreography with snow wonderful done
That was the work of huge team of animator with good budget but a few thing maybe could be emulated

Watching the part with snow make how to improve rain and snow effect...but it would at least double the work.

Snow as rain fall in 3 different way on 3 different layers:

foreground big blurred snow flakes falling slower[b] never on straight lines [/b]
as fallen leaves they never fall straight as a brick, ....not even on a oblique line...
(Not snow rain instead basically could do it...but eyes need some swirling also in rain)

middle distance less blurred, more little they fall following little more straight lines (not too straight)

Background little sharper and quicker and a bit straighter

Of course is a lot of work more but difference is amazing

Thanks for this! I combined it with your glass globe container tutorial and came up with this

I've done this a few times and I always get a horizontal line in my animation. Anyone know how to fix this?

Hi, cambridge! Thanks for trying out the tutorial. Without seeing the line you're referring to, it's hard to speculate - maybe you could post a screenshot? But, I'll take a stab at it without a screenie.

I *suspect* that your snow layers are overlapping and not matching up correctly. Any overlap between the snow layers would create more "noise" at that location than the rest of the layers, making it have a line appearance. You might want to check your xcf file to see if you've lined those up correctly.

Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Art

I had this problem too. My mistake was not overlap, but a gap in between.

Cambridge, make sure when you make the select to create the snow, you select from the top corner to the middle of your image (example, for a 100x100 image you would select from 0,0 to 100,50). Otherwise you either get overlap or a gap.

Hope that was usefull.

I used an animated glitter type pattern with three layers. But what I did was RGB then unoptimize, then each layer I made seamless then applied. Came out pretty good. I have to try your method now.
I used it in this xmas greeting for my band below.