In the quest to bring animated GIFs into Second Life, I decided to turn a clip from my recent machinima into a GIF with the hope of being able to bring it back in to Second Life as a texture file.

Earlier I mentioned an idea to create a gallery or museum devoted to the animated GIF. The idea was to use Peregrine’s nifty web-based texture creator to generate the files and scripts. But I quickly realized that it would reject most GIF files for being too large (though I don’t know if that is based on file size or image proportions). So I wanted to try to find the sweet spot for creating a GIF file with a small file size footprint that will also work in Peregrine’s texture generator.

I intend to say more about the process of generating these texture files in a subsequent post after I take this animated version of the Scorphonic Radio Selector back in to Second Life. For now, I’d just like to leave a few notes and links for myself so I don’t have to reanimate the reel the next time I want to do one of these.

Once again, I used MPEG Streamclip to grab a short portion of the video file. For the sake of smoothness in the animation, I wanted to the excerpt have the reels in roughly the same position in the first and final frame. As you’ll note, there are four little circles on each real so that would require a one-quarter rotation to serve my purpose. This accounted for a roughly 6 second clip.

I used the recommended 8 frames per second capture when saving the frames as individual PNG files. That meant roughly 48 files to be imported as layers in the GIMP. I knew the sucker would be way to big but I wanted to work through the entire process before tweaking things. I cropped the image to the dimensions you see in the animation (197×343) as the entire scene wasn’t required.

The GIF file was saved and weighed in at 1.5 mb. This is way to big.

From there it was a question of deleting frames. Checking frame by frame, I noticed that frame 6 and frame 48 matched up perfectly. Counting by six, I kept frames 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, and 42 and deleted the rest. When these 8 frames were exported as a GIF, the file size was 254 kb. The playback was good but there was a repeated jitter. It turns out this is because when 6 and 48 played in sequence the result was a brief pause. So I deleted 6 and was almost satisfied with the result.

I wasn’t too keen on the clouds jumping round with time through the six frames. So I decided I needed to use layer masking. The only problem is that I couldn’t remember how to do it. Fortunately, another tutorial from Jim quickly reminded me how to do it.

As the end of the tl;dr post approaches, I must confess that this whole project seems a bit daft to me. But I think I have an obtainable objective in mind. I appreciate the chance to share the little steps and bits of learning that occur along the way. Up next, I need to see how the texture and script work in SL.