Too much time on my hands

JDaniel · JDaniel's Garage

I seem have a lot of time on my hands now that the 911 has been "put away" for the winter.
So much time that I've spent the past 3 hours perfecting my new Pelican Avitar... Perhaps this is the first stage of Porsche Withdrawl. You can't play with the car, so you play with pictures.
It's 2:30am for pete's sake!

MMARSH · MMARSH's Garage

Yea but its cool, and you dont have to worry about frying your clutch and killing your tires

Michael Marshall

Z-man · Z-man's Garage

Nice job, Dan. I like it! (I've only got this boring one I made: at least it's animated!)

-Z.

JDaniel · JDaniel's Garage

I'll be honest. The first 1.5 hours were spent on a great little Flash cartoon. Then I realized that you can't use SWF files as the avitar. So it was back to the antiquated animated Gif.

Several thousand virtual spinouts, and the clutch is still fine! I keep having to draw in new virtual tires... they seem to be wearing out a bit quickly!

josh912 · 11-19-2001, 12:13 PM

Ok, this is bugging me. How do you guys do all of this fancy dazy stuff? I'm lucky if I can get a still picture.

Z-man · Z-man's Garage

Josh:
You need an application that allows you to create an 'animated gif.' (I used Microsoft Image Composer's GIF animator)
All it is is a program that you put a series of pictures together, and it automagicaly shows them like a slide show. If it is done right, with enough detail, it looks like full motion, like JDaniel's spin.
-Zoltan.
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PCA NNJR
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JDaniel · JDaniel's Garage

Correct. You need software that will allow you to create an animated GIF. This costs $$$. You'll also need plenty of photos of your car at different angles.

BUT

If you go to Macromedia's web site you can download a FREE 30 day demo of any of their software.!!!. The goal is to get you to buy their stuff, but if you just want to try a few things, the deal can't be beat. Be careful you might end up buying the stuff.

I use Fireworks to make animated Gif's (although I used photoshop 6.01 to edit the images) and I believe it includes a tutorial. If you want to try it and have questions just e-mail me (off line of course.. I'll walk you through it).