I want to make an avatar, but lack the know-how...

Heya art gurus!

I was curious if anyone could give me pointers on how to make a detailed, crisp, animated avatar for this forum. I'm very, very, very proud of my main's costume, and want to get a better avatar, since I spend so much time on the forums.

What I'm thinking is something like different shots of his costume, like leg, then belt, then arm, then cape, then shoulder, then head. And then end with a picture of his torso for a few seconds before looping back.

Can anyone suggest a program that I could download that would let me do this?

Thanks much!

Google a GifAnimator. Its easy to use, just stick some pics in to it and it will play them in a loop.

program - not specifically. But. try googling for 'gif animators' (might wanna add 'free' in there too)

You'll also need some editing software to crop and resize your screenshots.

If you want a 'movie' avatar of your character in motion. I suggest the excellent CoH demo launcher. search the forums for demo's, or creating editing demos (there is an excellent guide in the 'guide to guides' thread, as well as the link to the launcher.)

What you are looking to do is to use the launcher to export your movie frame by frame to a folder, then use your gif animator (I use Adobe Image ready, which lets you do this, but that's not free or cheap, so you'll have to go with what you can find) to stitch them back together into an animated gif.

Having played a bit with doing this, I'd advice only using every 2nd frame, or the action will seem a bit slow (and the file will be twice as big!)

If you are just going to have a series of poses, then setting them on a loop and delay between each frame should be very easy.

Sorry I'm not more help with specific software. I'm sure someone here can recomend a good one and the specific's to how to do it with that. (On the other hand, if you find yourself with Photoshop and Image Ready, I can help you with that in about 30 seconds.)

I'd say GIF animator is your best bet. But as Snowlily said, you'd need a program that can crop the images. I use Photoshop myself, but that's expensive, and I wouldn't suggest buying that just to crop a few pics... I don't really know what you'd wanna get for cheap.. I dunno.

MS Paint works for cropping too.

Look into Paint Shop Pro and Animation Shop. I know Jaasc was recently bought out by Corel so I don't if they're bundled together anymore, but they used to be.

Animation Shop was a fun GIF/PNG animator. It has numerous pre-built in animations. If I remember correctly it has a crop/zoom/resize ability built in, but it's not nearly as good as full fledge graphics program. I think it usually goes for about $40.

PSP is a great graphics editing program for under $100. The last version we used was 8 and there was very few things we couldn't do in PSP that we had to use Photoshop for. My wife feels PSP is actually friendlier to the new graphics editors than Photoshop is, less of a learning curve. PSP however is not as versatile and powerful.


Edit: Wow I just reread my post and I sound like a damned salesman.... I'm not... Just someone who's been there.