GIMP DOWNLOAD NEWS ABOUT DOCS PARTICIPATE TUTORIALS DONATE 

Advanced Animations Tutorial

Text and images Copyright (C) 2002 Jakub Steiner and may not be used without permission
of the author.

Intention
Welcome to the advanced GIMP animation tutorial. Here you’ll learn how
to use the GAP, GIMP animation package. It is very advanced, but the
user interface might be confusing for some at first. That’s why we’ll start
with a little theory before we move over to the practical part.

The key function of the GAP is the move path dialog. Please go to the
“Using GAP” tutorial to learn more about the tool.

Step 1

To make things easier, we’ll start with a ready-to-go static image. To load
it into GIMP, just drag the image above to the GIMP toolbox. In case this
doesn’t work for you, copy the link by selecting Copy Target or Copy Link
Location from the image context menu accessible by right-clicking on
the image. In GIMP, choose Open Location from the toolbox File menu
and paste the URL there. Gimp will download the compressed image and
open it for you.

Step 2

Now drag the background layer from the static image to the GIMP
toolbar. This will create a new white image we’ll use as a base for our
animation. To be able to work with GAP you need to save it in GIMP’s
native format, .xcf. Create a separate directory for the file, it will fill with
many frame files soon. The file needs to be named like this:

name-0001.xcf

You can only change the name part. The rest needs to be exactly the way
shown. GAP works on series of .xcf images, so that you can work with
layers the same way as you do in static images. You don’t have to copy
the file yourself to add a frame. GAP has series of functions to help you
manage frames. We’ll create a 20 frame animation, so the first thing will
be to copy the first frame 19 times using the video/duplicate
frames function.

Step 3

Now it’s time to use the move path function. Make sure you have the
static image open but use the function on the white background image.
In the dialog, select the logo image as source and make sure you set the
stepmode to none! Keep the mode as normal and choose some handle
mode. I have used center, so use that if you’re going to stick with the
parameters provided here.

For the logo we’ll animate two parameters. First, we’ll zoom out the logo
so it appears to fly away from the observer and combine that with
opacity increase. For the first animation point use the following
parameters: x:157, y:74, width:800, height:800, opacity:20. Keep the rest
default. Now add a new animation point by clicking on the add point
button. Notice how the status above the button changed to current key:
[ 2 of 2 ]. Now change the width, height and opacity back to 100%. You
can check the result on any animation point by navigating to it (using
next and previous or other buttons) and clicking on the update preview
button. You can also preview the whole animation using the Anim
preview button. This will create a new layered image, so don’t be
impatient, it takes a while.

Adding points to your animation creates linear time segments between

those. If you want to create non-linear animation, just set a specific
frame to the active point using the keyframe slider. We won’t need it for
the logo animation, so let’s just press ok for now.

Step 4

GAP Animation Tutorial

Now we have a rendered sequence of images. You can navigate them

easily using the video/VCR navigator. Pressing play on the navigator will
call two functions, frames to image and animation playback, so it’s fast
and convenient to use it to check the looks of your animation.

You can also specify the default delay between frames by setting the
framerate in FPS (frames per second). The higher the value, the
smoother the animation will be, but more frames will be needed. You
can also render only segments of the whole animation by selecting
particular frame thumbnails in the navigator before pressing the play
button. Use shift, ctrl or drag your mouse to select multiple frames. If
you press Shift while pressing the play button, the resulting animation-
image will be optimised (as discussed in the simple animation tutorial).

As you can see on the image above, I have added some more movement
effects for every source layer of the static image using only the move
path dialog. You can now try to recreate the animation yourself, you
know tool to be able to.

Step 5
All we need to do now is to save the animation. You can choose to go for
the GIF format as I did with the image above, but the filesize is too huge
to be widely accepted on the web anyway, so you can consider using a
regular animation format like avi (needs special version of the xanim
player from Loki) or mpeg1 / 2.

To save the animation as gif, first apply the video/frames to image

function. This will create a single multi-layered image with the specified
delay. Now apply the animation optimize filter (not that useful in this
case) and finaly index the image to 16 color without using any color
dithering. The file will still be about 170kB, so it’s huge. You can consider
trying some specialised optimisation software like GIFsicle. Maybe MNG
with its sprite based animation will make it more suitable for the web.
Rendering will happen on the browser side and I’m very excited about
the idea.

Last thing I can’t help myslef not to mention is to thank Wolfgang Hofer
for making such a great plugin that takes GIMP functionality to a new
level. With GIMP 2 rendering engine we’ll probably see more
“applications” like that using GIMP’s features to provide us with another
area of application. I’d also like to thank the GIMP developer community
to work hard every day to give us the best web gfx tool there is. If you
just started to experience GIMP, don’t hesitate and drop by up at #gimp
on irc.gimp.org:6669.

Text and images Copyright (C) 2002 Jakub Steiner and may not be used without permission
of the author.

GIMP  ABOUT GIMP  GET INVOLVED

 DOWNLOAD  DOCUMENTATION  TUTORIALS
 NEWS  DONATE

Features Bug Reports Twitter

Release Notes Mailing Lists Google+
Roadmap IRC Facebook
Wiki Books
FAQ

GIMP News Feed  | Contacting Us

Unless otherwise noted, The GIMP Website by The GIMP Team is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Search GIMP.org