I’ve just finished my beginner project and are trying to figure out how to save a AVI or similar format of my animation so i can try to convert it to GIF to use for my avatar here. Could any1 tell me how to do it?
Hi, short answer, running out of time this evening:
- for AVI, in Format panel:
replace Jpeg by AVI Jpeg or AVI Raw
set Quality to level required (95 should do it)
in Anim panel:
select Start: first frame
selct End: last frame
press ANIM
go and retrieve your animation in the directory defined in the first field of the Output panel
- for GIF, do exactly the same except choose a PNG format (for example)
open Gimp and then drag and drop the individual numbered PNG files into it… saves as GIF and choose accordingly the animation settings
Cheers,
If you have a program that will read AVIs directly, just use any of the available codecs in blender. Otherwise render them to an image sequence of either jpegs or whatever, then use a program like Photoshop or Gimp to convert to GIFs.
Typically you want to render your background seperately, then render your animated features seperately with an alpha channel so you can drop them in and minimize your animated GIF file size.
olivS:
i’ve tried what you said and i even changed the address to the desktop (for better access) and still can’t find it. i’m on a Mandriva Linux Computer. maybe it has something to do with it. your idea with GIMP are a good one since i have it too on my computer.
i’m still having problems trying to save and find PNG, AVI and similar format files.
I could “save as image” but what i want is a PNG or a GIF (whichever is better) to use to create a avatar for this forum.
EDIT: just found my PNG files. Now the only thing left is to try and figure out how to use GIMP to convert PNG to GIF. I’m a total noob with GIMP so could some1 help tell me what to do?
Doesn’t the quality settings affect only jpegs?
If you are in Linux you can use imagemagick, which you probably have already installed.
convert *.png movie.gif
Linux rulez - It can’t get any easier 
Edit:
I should note, that you can use parameters like
-loop 0
loop indefinitely
-delay 5
time in miliseconds (i think) between frames.
convert -loop 0 -delay 5 *.png movie.gif
Yes, this is nice. But the gif-file will become quite large. Open it in Gimp, apply “Filter->Animation->Optimize (for Gif)”.
Hundredths of a second, actually.
Since gifs are 8-bit colour only, adding “-dither” to the command line may help. Or it may not, try it with “+dither” (to turn it off) too, and compare the results.
Also, gifs are lossless, so it would be best to render your frames losslessly too, so you get no compression artefacts in the result. PNGs or TGAs are the usual choices.
I had no idea imagemagick could make animated gifs… I’ll have to remember that. No more dragging every frame into the same window in GIMP for me! (man that gets boring fast in a 100+ frame animation)
can somebody sent a little bit specific instructions on how convrnt PNGs into GIF?
Imagemagick is an universal image converting tool. Usually preinstalled in every linux distribution, but windows version exists too - link
It doesn’t have any graphical interface, so it’s a little confusing for windows users.
After you install imagemagick, it will set itself into the PATH variable (reboot may be required in some windows versions), which means you will be able to execute the program from every directory, which is quite handy.
Once you render your animation into a series of png images, you enter their directory in Total Commander and write down a command to convert them to gif.
convert -loop 0 -delay 5 *.png movie.gif
and there you go.
In windows it’s also possible to create a desktop shortcut, which will convert drag&dropped pngs to an animated gif. I’ll probably post some screenshots when I have access to a windows machine.