Oh well, first effort at animating the merchantman's route. This very simple animation has already resulted in a 4.6mb file. Gonna have to find a way to make the file size smaller or it's going to be a very short animation.
Oh well, first effort at animating the merchantman's route. This very simple animation has already resulted in a 4.6mb file. Gonna have to find a way to make the file size smaller or it's going to be a very short animation.
I wanted to do the same thing for last month's challenge...animate the route, but there's no way I could do that at the size I was at and since I don't know anything about flash I didn't go that way either. What you have is pretty darn cool, though.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
I'm just looking at Flash now...Serif Drawplus animates in that too (and it's easy to learn)...the file sizes are MUCH smaller...by masses. This is great because instread of using stop-frame like in the one I've just done, (old style draw one frame at a time), I can do keyframe animation and move the camera around the map (so I can zoom in and not lose the detail). I might even do a voice over of the captain talking about the journey....ahh the dreams we have before we find out how hard it all is!
hmm need to work out how to host the flash anim on a website or even better embed it here.
test flash.swf - 0.63MB
Last edited by ravells; 10-11-2009 at 05:35 PM.
Wow! Really like the animated route. An animated GIF is perfect. Wish I would have thought of that.
So it's not just me! This happens to me on every map. Thankfully, I seem to get a bit further toward them each timeOriginally Posted by ravells
Ravs-
If each frame only adds another dash and the frame disposal is set to combine rather than replace, this is quite small (308kB). In yours, each frame is a full copy of the whole image, plus another dash:
This is easy in Gimp. I'm not sure what you are using to create the gif, however, so no suggestions on how to get there.
-Rob A>
My tutorials: Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional Map ~ All My Tutorials
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My Maps: Finished Maps ~ Challenge Entries ~ My Portfolio: www.cartocopia.com
Animated Gifs of reasonably complicated images eat memory though...as I found on the first pass...flash is working though. There is no reason at all why you can't do an animation too.
When you wrap this all up, can you do up a tut? I've just gotta learn how to do that but don't have Serif but will get it if it means that I can learn.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
The great thing about Serif is you don't have to learn any code (if you don't want to). It's all pretty much drag and drop and the software kind of does it all. Drawplus comes with a pretty decent manual and the help files are pretty good too. There are a lot of actions you can do in the animation. For example you can draw an object and if it is clicked it will start the 'film' rolling from a different point etc. It's all pretty intuitive. I'm flirting with the idea of making a simple trading game using this stuff now, but I'm not going to have much time this month so I'll probably do something much simpler with no user interaction.
Serif (particularly the non current versions) is pretty cheap to buy too. You can download free (earlier) versions here (Drawplus SE has animation but I think the version I have has more stuff) which will give you a feel for the software. Download it and have a play. Besides the animation it's a pretty darn good piece of software for mapping, IMO. Much faster (although not as feature rich - but not far off) than Photoshop or illustrator.
Good video tour here.
Last edited by ravells; 10-11-2009 at 07:37 PM.
Neat stuff here Ravs!
I've done a few things in FLASH in the past, while extremely powerful I find that the interface is kinda clunky and overly time consuming. It seems as though Serif alleviates some of that though.
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