Wayfarers of Veeshan

Thanks to Alley for the nice comment on my animated avatar. I'm not the first to come up with "nifty" avatar ideas, so thought I'd put what I know here and maybe others will share their ideas.

For mine, I wanted my face to mesh in and out with a spectre. I tried it a few ways, but always with the final file being an "animated gif". I use PaintShop Pro 7.0, which has an animation tool built in.

At first, I wanted it to stay "drexxell" for 5 seconds, then flash a fast spectre face, and then back to my face again...sort of to give the idea "did I just see Drexxell's face change?".

But then Tan and I got to talking about my earlier attempts, and so I went back to the drawing board and instead of a "flash" I told it to do a fade-in/fade-out on transition. Basically the file is 3 pictures...my face, a spectres face, and my face again...told it to fade to spectre then fade to my face, then repeat infinitely.

The problem is, with a nice CLEAN fade, it creates about 50 intermittent "frames" and made the file unmanagebly large. So I squeezed the quality as bad as I could to minimize file size.

The LINE-UP itself between my face and the spectre's face was manually done by cutting/pasting 2 EQ screenshots. There are better ways to line up 2 faces, such as "morphing" software, but that's not what this was.

Drex

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Drexxell , 71st GNecrOMancEr -- Wielder of ()
Druul , 60th Troll Shaman () + Wielder of and
Driss, 51st Dwarf Priestess of Brell Serilis
Dralia, 36th Erudite Enchantress

Thanks for the brief tutorial!

Would be cool to do that with someone who plays different characters - have them fade in and out to each other.

*contemplates making a Haams/Puddinghead/Jonez avatar*

ulead gif animator is a nice program for animating gifs also and offers a free version for download (or did last time I checked).

Update: no longer free, but has a free trial

Update again: anyone using more recent versions of photoshop (5.5 and up I think?) should also have imageready which does an excellent job of doing simple (and not so simple) animations.

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Trapped in Veeshan. Send food.

Before PSP7.0 I used "Advanced Gif Animator", which has a 30 day free trial, which can be re-re-re-re-...re-newed every 30 days....or, so I've heard

Drex

_________________
Drexxell , 71st GNecrOMancEr -- Wielder of ()
Druul , 60th Troll Shaman () + Wielder of and
Driss, 51st Dwarf Priestess of Brell Serilis
Dralia, 36th Erudite Enchantress

_________________
Drexxell , 71st GNecrOMancEr -- Wielder of ()
Druul , 60th Troll Shaman () + Wielder of and
Driss, 51st Dwarf Priestess of Brell Serilis
Dralia, 36th Erudite Enchantress

_________________
-- Mindbender Llaffer Outloud
L70 ENC
<select name=Skills>
<option>78 past 1750
<option>272 from 2100
<option>Jewelry:300+Trophy
<option>Tailoring:259+Geerlok
<option>Pottery:256+Geerlok
<option>Smithing:256+15%
<option>Fletching:254+Geerlok
<option>Baking:252+Geerlok
<option>Brewing:251+Geerlok
<option>Research:202+Geerlok
<option>Alcohol Tolerance:200
<option>Fishing:182
</select>

Gentlemen and Ladies,

I have been trying to upload a simple avatar for my main character with little success. My avatar meets the requirements 110 x 110 pixels and less than 2 K bytes. I have done this before but that could have been prior to my upgrade with xp. I receive a sharing violation and several others that go to fast to capture. Any suggestions on what I am doing wrong. please let me know.

Please direct error messages/processes/et al regarding the boards to me directly via PM or email.

I'm looking at this right now to see what/where the problem is.

Okay ... looks like it may have been a permissions issue with the directory that holds the avatars. I think I've fixed it, so you should be good to go now. Please let me know if that is NOT the case.

<edited a couple times ..>

_________________
-- Mindbender Llaffer Outloud
L70 ENC
<select name=Skills>
<option>78 past 1750
<option>272 from 2100
<option>Jewelry:300+Trophy
<option>Tailoring:259+Geerlok
<option>Pottery:256+Geerlok
<option>Smithing:256+15%
<option>Fletching:254+Geerlok
<option>Baking:252+Geerlok
<option>Brewing:251+Geerlok
<option>Research:202+Geerlok
<option>Alcohol Tolerance:200
<option>Fishing:182
</select>

_________________
Trapped in Veeshan. Send food.

Tanliel,

You're the best works like a champ as you can see from this posting.