Need help making an animated giff

[enginestar]

I need to make an animated gif of a circle logo.

The logo needs to spin like a coin and come back and rest in its original state.

I've spent 30 minutes trying to find a tool that gives me what I want - can't find anything.

The ones that I do find are subscription for something like $25 per month. I only need to make one single animation!

Can anyone recommend an online tool I can use to make what I want?

Else... can I make with Affinity Desktop? Create individual frames?

I wasn't sure of the best way of doing this and keeping the graphic be centre of the screen.

+ I need to keep it precise - so wasn't sure which controls to use.

+ Not sure about flipping horizontally.

Hoping someone can give me some pointers.

Thanks.

[GarryP]

None of the Affinity applications have any animation functionalities.

Did you try searching the forums for animate or animation to see if there was any existing advice that could help you?

[enginestar]

@GarryP

I didn't search as you said.

I'll do that now.

But... surely I should be able to create 20 frames say with the graphic flipping the way I want?

I was hoping someone would give me guidance on doing that.

Thanks.

[Alfred]

4 minutes ago, enginestar said:

But... surely I should be able to create 20 frames say with the graphic flipping the way I want?

I’m sure you could easily create the frames in Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo, but wouldn’t any animation software worth its salt be able to do that, too? It’s likely to be much more straightforward doing it all in a single app instead of swapping between two.

[HCl]

.

[enginestar]

On 5/16/2024 at 12:50 PM, Alfred said:

I’m sure you could easily create the frames in Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo, but wouldn’t any animation software worth its salt be able to do that, too? It’s likely to be much more straightforward doing it all in a single app instead of swapping between two.

Yes! You would have thought so. I've spent days now searching 🤦‍‍ 

I can't find anything that does what I want - JUST to flip a circle graphic on the xaxis.

[David in Яuislip]

Anything like this?

Then imagemagick to the rescue
Create your layers, add layer names like the attached example file, export slices as pngs to a clean folder and run
magick -dispose background -delay 10 -loop 8 -background none s*.png -gravity center -extent %[fx:max(w,h)]x%[fx:max(w,h)] -layers optimize result.gif

It's pretty clever as imagemagick handles the various slice sizes and centralises them all, most other approaches would require the frames to be full size which is just more work. Adjust delay and number of loops to taste, the one displayed is set to zero to cause maximum annoyance, good luck

 

Coin_Spin.afphoto

[enginestar]

@David in Яuislip that's MAGIC!

That's exactly what I want!

ImageMagick - awesome... I'll use that.

PROBLEM: how do I get the individual frames?

This is something I am struggling with... I need to precisely adjust the graphic 30 degrees say and skew.

How can I do this using Affinity?

(Now wondering if I can do using ImageMagick...)

Let me know.

Thanks.

[David in Яuislip]

Look at the file I posted, you'll see each frame in a layer, then use Export persona
I don't follow your, "adjust the graphic 30 degrees say and skew" but can't you use the Transform panel?

[enginestar]

I didn't realise you had a file 🙂

I opened just now and had a look - thanks.

The graphic needs to be skewed and rotated on the x axis.

See this image for example:

Do you see what I mean?

EDIT: I asked ChatGPT to give me code to turn the graphic and give me frames using imageMagick - it told me that it can't do 3D transformation - that I found surprising.

Can I use Affinity to precisely transform and make successive frames as shown above?

Using the transform tool, I can only do by hand.

Thanks.

[David in Яuislip]

It seems to me that those frames were generated by a 3D modelling program. You aren't going to get frames like this

with Affinity, it can resize and skew things but they'll come out as flat discs
The transform panel is very versatile, look up Power Duplicate as that may speed up the process if you're thinking of 50 frames like your example
I don't understand, "rotated on the x axis", do you mean rotate about the equator?

[enginestar]

3D not necessary! Happy to go without.

x axis - maybe I got that wrong! I want it rotating like what you had in the first pic.

In terms of 'rotation and skewing', your example definitely doesn't have it correct.

See this pic I found on the internet:

(Forget the 3D edge - not worried about getting 3D)

I've played around with Affinity photo, but I can't get the same slant.

I started on this many days ago - I thought it was a 5 minutes job!

Any idea how I can get the 3D effect? Importantly: I need to set numbers in a property and have it adjust.

 

 

[David in Яuislip]

If you want to achieve a viewpoint like that then I don't think Photo is the right program
Here I rotated the coin until the black line was vertical
Made an ellipse to trace the coin edge
Rotated it back then applied some skew
I don't have the patience to proceed to the next frame
Good luck

[GarryP]

16 hours ago, enginestar said:

3D not necessary! Happy to go without.

 

16 hours ago, enginestar said:

(Forget the 3D edge - not worried about getting 3D)

 

16 hours ago, enginestar said:

Any idea how I can get the 3D effect?

I’m still not sure what you are trying to achieve.
All of your visual examples are drawn as though the object has three dimensions, and you say you don't want 3D but you do want the 3D effect.

To make a 2D design look like it’s 3D you will need to manually add the ‘extra dimension’ (if necessary), manually add shadows and lighting effects, and maybe do some other things, which can be tricky, even for people who have done it before. (I’ve tried it a few times and I’m still terrible at it.)

In your case, you will need to do that for every frame, making careful/subtle changes in each, and also make sure that the ‘transition’ between these effects is realistic between the frames and over the whole series of frames. That takes things to a much higher level of difficulty which will take a lot of time, patience, and skill.

As has already been stated, I don't think Photo is the right software to use for what you want to achieve.

Note: If you do a web search for affinity 3d coin there are some videos which show how to make a 3D-like coin.
The videos, that I’ve skimmed through, which are for the more-realistic results, are twenty minutes long, or longer.
Imagine doing all of that, and maybe more, for each and every frame.
And that's without experimentation and practice time.

Edited May 25, 2024 by GarryP
Added note.