GIMP: Animation Tutorial 

Cheers. No worries

Cheers!

I’ve never done pixel art in unity, only gamemaker. You need export them as .png, make sure there is an alpha channel, and that all the background is gone. Check out my other video “exporting sprites”

Did you import the image in to Gimp?? If so what format was it??

@@CryoNoir PSD files im new to gimp most of the stuff is similar i did manage to get it off but everything is still locked to that space cant put anything outside of it ( it is an 8-bit character design)

I’ve never used PSDs before, but it sounds like your limited by the canvas size. You can alter that and set each layer to the image size and that should fix that problem.

Oooh. Good question. I’m sure if found GIF options in the animation tab, but I’ve never tried to do it. If you google GIF maker I’m sure there’ll be loads is free ones out there. 👍

It is absolutely possible and very easy! All you have to do is keep the transparent layers and then go to (file -> export as) and save it as a gif. When you export, it will give you a popup, make sure you check the box "as animation" and the dialog box "frame disposal where unspecified" is set to "One frame per layer (replace)". Then click export. If you then open up that image back in gimp (as a gif, not .xcf), you will notice that all the layer's names will have (100 ms) and (replace) after them. These are tags that gimp uses for animations. The (100ms) is the amount of time in milliseconds the animation should wait before the next frame, (replace) means that the animation should delete everything before it displays the next frame. Note that you can also set the animation mode to (combine), this does the opposite, the animation will keep the previous layers visible until another (replace) is found. If you use the play animation inside gimp, the animation will take these tags into consideration when playing the animation. You can simply tweak these tags within gimp as well if you want to change the delay between frames. (remember 1000ms = 1 second) I know i am a month late, but I hope this helps!

It kind of depends on what engine the developer is using. I know Unreal prefers a sprite sheet. In that case I would make the animation in layers, the n create a new project with one layer that’s big enough to fit all the frames, ie if you have 10 frames of 32x32 then 320x320 and then import them onto it in order. Otherwise you should just be able to send them as 1 image per frame and they can take it from there. I know both Unity and Game Maker is fine with that. Just make sure to label them clearly, remove EVERY pixel you want to be invisible (I’ve been stung by that a few times lol) and export them as .png If you have lots of frames you can get a free plug in for gimp that’ll export as layers to speed the process up. Hope that helps. 😁

I think I covered that in my other gimp tutorial “jpeg vs png”

great, thank you for the exaustive reply, I actually want help a project called Might anf Magic 8.5, it is an old RPG but still popular and (with an editor for modding) a classic game that uses sprites (made from 3d models and then virtually photographed to get 8 positions for every action...so clockwise: 0 degree, 45, 90, (90+45) 180, and then the rest are mirrors to get a complete circle. What I want to use though are sprites using real 3d characters made with plasticine. The process will be: to create a plasticine model, take 8 photos for each action, like standing, hitting, dying etc...then I think I will follow your suggestion to send a file with separate photos for each frame, an yes of course I need to tag all the photos properly to be as clear as I can....yes also I totally get it that I have to cancel every drop of background; I did a test and that was a serious problem...but thank you for have pointed me out this issue....Thank you a lot and I'm going to follow your great tutorials...I keep you posted on my progress....cheers!

Sound cool!! I think they did a similar technique for Primal Rage!! Keep me updated!!

I will, yes you are right, Primal Rage and Primal rage 2 and of course Doom dos, the original...cheers!

Oh yeh, there are loads of programs out there that are better for pixel art animation, however Gimp is a really good free program for image manipulation in general. I spent loads of time learning gimp, so because of that I can do pixel art a lot faster in gimp than in asprite or GraphicsGale or Krita just by knowing my way round. It does animation a lot better now than back when I filmed this, but as I’m not really doing 2d pixel art at the mo, I’ve not tried it out.

@@CryoNoir natron is also open source and shares a few plugins with gimp , especially g'mic also cross import linking with blender

Sweet.

I would make a composite. Cut the car out, create the sky animation on as many layers as you want, and then add the car back in to each frame.

Sorry, I covered that in my other tutorial jpeg vs png. It all depends on what your going to do with the animation. For game sprites, remove all the background from each frame and the got file, export as, and the export each layer separately as a Png. If it’s for a video, do the same but keep the frames as complete pictures and either use JPEG if compression isn’t an issue, or png if you want better visual quality. Hope that helps.

@@CryoNoir so gimp cannot animate.

death maze Hey! It’s not really designed as animation software. It’s more an open source alternative to photoshop. The animation component is just a handy addition for sprite work for game development. I know it’s been fleshed about quite a bit with Gimp2.0. But I’ve not tried it as I’ve started working in 3D now.

@@CryoNoir its all good. i learned some things about layers. and i just found the program i used to create the other animations on my channel. it was on my previous pc which bricked and i forgot the programs name. vsdc video editor if anybody needs a free program to create traditionally animated video projects

To the best of my knowledge gimp doesn’t let you export an animation. Check in the “export as” section to see if it’s got a giff extension, of there might be a plug in for it. I always expected the individual layers for use as sprites in games or as still images an then loaded them into a video editor.

Not that I’m aware of. All the animation I’ve done with Gimp I’ve done frame by frame, then exported all of the images and then put them into a video editor as pictures. It takes a very long time and I’m sure there are much more efficient ways to do longer animations, but as most of the animation I do is for game development it does the job. Check out Marmoset Hexels 2, that’s got a much better animation suite.

@@CryoNoir Is that open source? That is my budget right now.

@@showman139 Nah, but it's not expensive like an adobe subscription. I think it's only like $10-$15 or so.....

@@CryoNoir if you live with parents. Then you will understand what this means "every paycheck counts." Open source is a preference.

@@showman139 True.

Cheers! It’s a handy little trick.

@@CryoNoir Hey, I wrote some scripts to help with the animation following your Layer Group idea: github.com/burhanloey/gimp-animation-scripts. Feel free to use them.

Wow!!! That’s well cool. I’ll check it out!!

🤣🤣🤣 Yeh, I know, but have to try an cover every eventuality. 🤣🤣🤣

Hey! I’m not entirely sure what you mean?

@@CryoNoir Oops, I accidentally meant if you can make a video on how to make an animation with 2 sprites? I know how to make a background. It will really help out for my channel, so if you can make a video on how to animate with 2 sprites that will be fantastic.

I have been looking over RU-vid to check how to make an animation with 2 sprites, but nothing showed up, I have requested in some videos but no one responded. It will be fantastic if you made one.

Hey! Sorry if I’ve not responded, I don’t always get notifications for comments. What do you mean by animations with 2 sprites? For game development I only ever do one sprite at a time and just do separate animations for each action. The game engine then cycles the appropriate animation depending on context. If you mean doing a bigger scene with multiple moving parts like my intro that’s a much bigger undertaking. Generally I animate each individual component separately, then put them all together in layer groups (I think I cover that in my animation video) then export each folder as an image, then put them in a video editor as stills....I hope that answered your question??? If not I’ll try again?

@@CryoNoir So what I mean is like, gyazo.com/c13e246bb8e768758ceee068625ce9df it is a Gyazo link, not that intense though, like beginners. If this doesn't make sense I'll try to respond to you better, thanks!

That’s a tough one...it all depends on what kind of animation you want to do, and to what end?? If you want to make pixel art game assets for a 2d game, I’d recommend Gimp and Asprite as good free tools. If you want to do stand alone animations (both 2d or 3D) Blender is supposed to be amazing for that. This is by no means a complete list. There might be loads of better, free software out there and the animation community would be a better place to ask. Animation isn’t really a big thing for me. I’ve done a bit of pixel art animation for game assets, but that’s the limit of my experience.

CryoNoir thank you I’ll subscribe to you