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Thread: October Entry - A Merchantman's tale

  1. #11

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    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.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Click image for larger version. 

Name:	animated map1.gif 
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Size:	4.66 MB 
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  2. #12
    Community Leader Facebook Connected Ascension's Avatar
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    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

  3. #13

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    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

  4. #14
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    Wow! Really like the animated route. An animated GIF is perfect. Wish I would have thought of that.

  5. #15

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    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.

  6. #16
    Community Leader Facebook Connected Ascension's Avatar
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    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

  7. #17

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    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.

  8. #18
    Community Leader Facebook Connected Steel General's Avatar
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    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.
    My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...

    Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.



  9. #19

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    Thanks SG, I have no basis for comparison of other ways to do Flash as I've only ever used Serif. You just do it in the software and then save it as a Flash file....anyway, I'll keep plugging away at it. The comp is a good reason to learn how it all works.

  10. #20
    Community Leader Guild Sponsor Gidde's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ravells View Post
    ....ahh the dreams we have before we find out how hard it all is!
    So it's not just me! This happens to me on every map. Thankfully, I seem to get a bit further toward them each time

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