[Neil M]

Hi ccbarr,
Great tut on card open animation. I do have a bit of trouble with the frame rate. You mention changing the first and 16th frame to 1500ms manually. My trouble is it changes all the frame to 1500, what am I doing wrong? Something simple no doubt. Could you be so kind and shed some light on it? Thank you

Neil M

[2-ton]

Molly, I just saw your gradient card....love it!

[Oregonian]

Neil M said:

Hi ccbarr,
Great tut on card open animation. I do have a bit of trouble with the frame rate. You mention changing the first and 16th frame to 1500ms manually. My trouble is it changes all the frame to 1500, what am I doing wrong? Something simple no doubt. Could you be so kind and shed some light on it? Thank you

Neil M

Hi Neil M and welcome to Gimp Talk.

It sounds like you are using the Settings filter to change the rate settings on the layers. The filter will change all of the rates on any visible layer.

One way you can change the rates on the two layers is to double-click the layer name, click in the highlighted text to unhighlight it, change the rate manually and press Enter. Do that on both layers.

Another way is to hold down the Shift key, click the visibility eye next to a layer you want to change the rate on, then click the eye on the other one you want to change, run the Settings filter on those two layers.

To return visibility to all of the layers, hold down the Shift key and click an eye again. You may have to do it more than one time. Holding down the Shift key toggles the visibility.

[Neil M]

Oregonian said:

Neil M said:

Hi ccbarr,
Great tut on card open animation. I do have a bit of trouble with the frame rate. You mention changing the first and 16th frame to 1500ms manually. My trouble is it changes all the frame to 1500, what am I doing wrong? Something simple no doubt. Could you be so kind and shed some light on it? Thank you

Neil M

Hi Neil M and welcome to Gimp Talk.

It sounds like you are using the Settings filter to change the rate settings on the layers. The filter will change all of the rates on any visible layer.

One way you can change the rates on the two layers is to double-click the layer name, click in the highlighted text to unhighlight it, change the rate manually and press Enter. Do that on both layers.

Another way is to hold down the Shift key, click the visibility eye next to a layer you want to change the rate on, then click the eye on the other one you want to change, run the Settings filter on those two layers.

To return visibility to all of the layers, hold down the Shift key and click an eye again. You may have to do it more than one time. Holding down the Shift key toggles the visibility.

Hey thank GT.
I thought it would be simple. One other thing I have going on, when the card opens I get the text on the left side showing through only in reverse. What can I do to fix this? Sorry if I sound like a newbie..... maybe I am.

[molly]

2-ton said:

Molly, I just saw your gradient card....love it!

Thanks 2-ton.
I didn't know what you were talking about at first. I had to go back and look.

[Oregonian]

Neil M said:

One other thing I have going on, when the card opens I get the text on the left side showing through only in reverse. What can I do to fix this? Sorry if I sound like a newbie..... maybe I am.

I have not done this tutorial. Hopefully someone else can answer your question.

[ccbarr]

Neil M said:

One other thing I have going on, when the card opens I get the text on the left side showing through only in reverse. What can I do to fix this?

Neil M,

Thank you for trying out the tutorial. Regarding the problem you are encountering with the text, I have some thoughts which hopefully can help you.

First, when designing that top Cover layer, make sure after you have set your text that you do Merge it down on to that layer. Otherwise you will have the text on a separate layer from the cover. Once you have it centered with the Align Tool, you can right-click on the text layer in the Layers Dialog window and select:

Merge Down

from the menu that opens after right-clicking.

Second, check to make sure that you have properly followed the portion of the tutorial where I show you how to create the Left Inside Cover layer from the original Cover layer.

If the above does not help, it might be worth your while to redo the tutorial from the beginning, following each step one by one at a very S-L-O-W pace. It's very easy to accidentally skip a part of the tutorial. I have done that myself when following tutorials.

In any event, if you have any additional questions feel free to ask. We will try our best to help you to successfully complete the tutorial.

:)

billy said:

If you have any suggestions or ideas they would be greatly appreciated.

In the case of using GAP, frames refer to individual images, not layers. For animated GIF images, the frames are indeed layers. What GAP does is first work with individual image frames and then one can later combine those separate image frames into one multi-layered image prior to saving it as a GIF animation.

With GAP, what you would do is first create the Background image.

You would then use the Duplicate Frames function of GAP to create 30 (in this case) duplicate separate image frames.

You would have a separate image containing the various parts that will be added into the Background image frames (remember frames in this case refer to the separate duplicated Background image frames). I usually name the image containing the parts that I will add in for creating the animation parts.xcf.

You would first use Move Path to move those various parts into the appropriate frames.

You would then use Apply filter on layer(s) function under Frames Modify and apply the Map Object filter to the various chosen layers.

After your animation is set up properly in GAP, then you would convert it to a multi-layered image using:

Video | Frames to Image

At that point, GAP would create a new multi-layered image for you, where each layer of the image would correspond to each frame of the image (from the range of frames that you select).

It can be difficult to grasp this all at first in part because the layers of an image are often referred to as frames. However, in GAP and most animation software, think of frames as individual images.

I hope this can help some.

miskairal said:

One thing I thought I'd mention though was it took me 20-30 minutes to work out how to change the delay for the first and 16th frames (what would we do without the undo button!!). So for anyone else out there who gets stuck at that point all you have to do is right click on the layer and select Edit Layer Attributes and edit the numbers

miskairal,

Thanks for expanding on that topic for new users. I mentioned in the beginning of the tutorial, that it was not meant for Gimp beginners. However, I am always glad to help new users who might be stuck on a specific step like that. Glad that you resolved it along with posting here to help others on that step. Thank you.

:)

@molly,

That is a very cool looking card that you made. Thank you for trying out the tutorial.

Hope all of this helps to clarify some of the issues people have experienced while following the tutorial. Thanks again for trying it. It's quite a basic tutorial, and it really can be applied to a lot of "folding" animations. Thanks again.

:)

[billy]

Neil M

If you are putting text on the inside left cover I believe you may have to use a mirror Image of the text. If i remember correctly I had to do that when I put an image on the inside cover,


Billy

[Danniel]

Thanks for the tutorial. I didn't know about this other animation plug-ins for gimp until I saw this topic.

I was never able to do anything at all with GAP, but with these plugins I've managed to do a simple animation quite easily, even before I was quite sure I understood exactly what you did in the tutorial.

I actually did an "animation" with gap, but by animation all I mean is just a few frames with some scribble lines in totally different places, with no sense of animation whatsoever. And even to do just that, that is, nothing, I've found extremely hard. I've just installed it again today, and I was just baffled that I didn't knew even where to start doing something (similarly with ktoon (which I'm not sure it even works) and synfig). Maybe I'm just dumb and unable to learn new things, but I find that the GAP is extremely difficult to grasp, whereas this process is totally intuitive.

I actually thought of trying to learn about gimp scripting and these things in order to do something similar to what these two scripts shown here do, I think I may have even mentioned it here, but I had other priorities, and would take just too long to start from scratch. Now I think I could spend some time in the future just trying to give these scripts a little bit of GAP's functionality, regarding the ability to save in a real video format, not just an animated gif... I probably won't do it, but I sure feel like doing it.

Here's the little silliness that I've done:



:mrgreen:


I think this trail was due to the "optimize for gif". Otherwise, really great extensions. I may be overestimating it, but I think it's what brings gimp the closest to a simple, intuitive animation program like autodesk animator. Even linux' Plastic Animation Paper is somewhat worse in usability, in my experience (at least the free version), it simply does not know how to handle the tablet pen. Whether I was going to actually draw, erase, press a button or not, was totally unpredictable.

My only complaint about these scripts is their placement among "filters". These are not "filters", if they are, I have a profound lack of understanding of what a filter is. I think it's a bit weird how many gimp plugins are either nested according with the script language or in some nonsensical manner. [/rant]

[radius]

Congratulations to the OP.

This is a professional-level tutorial in the way it is clearly written and laid out. The language is precise, the steps are logically numbered and ordered, screenshots are given as necessary, and - this is the nice touch - theoretical explanations are provided to help the user understand what they are doing and thus apply the techniques/tools in different contexts.

I'd also like to mention that the support offered throughout the thread - and the way it is offered - is also to the highest standards.

I don't know what your day job is, but you match the pro's with this one! :D

Well done again.

[Moko]

Colors got ruined. :cry: :cry:

Don't mind the theme lol it's for a gaming friend. :P

[2-ton]

lol, very good. You let it stay open and closed longer so there is plenty of time to read the text.

[Moko]

Yeah I noticed that. xD

I'll probably save the frames and make it a movie so the colors look better. :lol:

[radius]

Don't forget to fix the spelling of 'birthday' on the inside panel, too... :D

[Moko]

Aww dang it. :x I blame my lousy keyboard. XD

Thanks for pointing that out now. lol :mrgreen:

[Rhumbakai]

This is cool. I'll post my turnout soon.

[Rhumbakai]

Here is my turnout:

[img][/img]

[Rhumbakai]

Ok here it is:



Is it good? I just made it simple since it takes so much work.

[2-ton]

Yes, it's quite good.

[shelovesGIMP]

I seem to be having a problem with this. :|

I've done it before and it turned out okay, but this time...not happening.

Here's what I got...



Clearly, I'm doing something wrong. Any suggestions?

Thanks. :D