What is the best software for gif animation
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=15074
Printed Date: 22 February 2026 at 5:30pm
Topic: What is the best software for gif animation
Posted By: x2eco
Subject: What is the best software for gif animation
Date Posted: 11 September 2012 at 11:50pm
| I am using Pro Motion and Grafx2 as well as Gimp. I'm still very new to pixel art and I have never made a gif animation. I see alot of great work here and I can not match up any of it to software. For the software I mentioned, what would be the best way to add gif animation? Also, are there any threads someone can link that discusses an animation workflow for pixel art? |
Replies:
Posted By: x2eco
Date Posted: 12 September 2012 at 12:20am
Ok -  . It's been a while since I touched pro motion. I just realized it has gif animation support. Oops?
So let me change my question. I'm acquiring Graphics Gale. How do you guys compare GG to PM in terms of animation support.
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Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 12 September 2012 at 6:01am
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If you provide a sample of your work, it will be easier for people to point you in the right direction. In any case, no matter the program, be sure to get some basics on traditional animation. (At a minimum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_basic_principles_of_animation) In terms of software, I can see 2 categories, single-layer or multi-layer. *) Single-layer are more frequent. They are rather straightforward to use, because at any time T, there is only one bitmap, "what you see is what you get". It's what I implemented in Grafx2 (in 2.4 work-in-progress) *) Multi-layer allow more complex "scenes" where different planes have different animation: for example a character on the foreground is performing a looping 8-frame run loop, while the background is scrolling (panning) at a speed of 2 pixels by frame. It's what Flash allows, for example,and it comes at the cost of complexity: just see how your image's timeline looks when several things move at several speeds:  |
Posted By: x2eco
Date Posted: 12 September 2012 at 6:39am
| Will there be onion skin? I am trying grafx2 - love it. Just learning to load faded background layers to pixel over. I use gimp to fade my lineart to a fog gray. |
Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 12 September 2012 at 8:14am
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In Grafx2? Unlikely. It's technically a big constraint to implement, and the function is overrated for most game graphics. I mean, for high-resolution lineart where the outline's thinkness is negligible, onion skinning is as useful as in traditional animation : You work on a white canvas, individual lines have one screen pixel of thickness, Their color (lightness) clearly indicates which 'plane' they belong. Now if you try with a character smaller than a Street Fighter character (let's say < 96px), outlines are much thicker relative to the character. Some lines or segments from two frames will overlap entirely, and it will difficult for the viewer to mentally separate the two. Stacking more than 2 or 3 frames produces a big visual mess that doesn't help. |