ImageReady: Animation and Tweening
This will be a tutorial for tweening. Since animation will always be popular and because it's fun!!!
Truth to be told, there aren't that many tutorials with working images in the community's memories anymore (which is just what happens, in time), so I figured I'd try and see if I could do something about that, since the questions about ImageReady pop up quite often.
Expect one or two more from me on the same subject in a while.
Disclaimer: Since this tutorial wasn't written for icons perse, your end result (if you follow this exactly) will not adhere to icon-standards when it comes to filesize and image dimensions!
This is mostly because I use a whole lot of frames... The principle/technique still stands though and can be used perfectly well for icons with some adjustments.
We'll be making something like this:
If you haven't done so already, fire up your ImageReady. If your animation palette isn't there, activate it by going to Window-->Animation and checking it, as shown in the screenshot below.
Next, you'll have to get the images you'll be using into ImageReady. I'm going to assume you've already prepared your images as far as colouring and such goes. Also make sure all your images are the same size dimension-wise.
The easiest way to get multiple images in at once, is by using 'Import Folder As Frames' as shown below. Because I did not have all my images in one folder, I opened mine up and dragged them all into one window, which gave me one image with ten layers.
This is perfectly doable, but like I said; 'import folder as frames' is much faster.
If you used 'Import Folder As Frames', you'll already have a handy dandy animation in your animation palette by now.
If you did like I did, there will only be one frame in your animation palette, which should correspond with the topmost layer in your layers palette.
For reference, my layers palette looks like this at this point:
This is my animation palette so far:
You create a new frame by clicking the icon that looks a bit like a note paper (see screenshot below). This will duplicate the frame that preceded it, so this is normal behavior! (In other words; don't think you've messed up, hehehe...)
Also note that the newly created frame will automatically will become the 'active' frame (hence the blue borders), which is quite essential if you want to change something about this particular frame. (As an aside, you can activate any frame at any given time by simply clicking on it.)
So now we've got two exactly the same frames. That does not an animation make, n'est-ce pas? We want the second frame to have a different image.
So head on over to your layers palette and click on the little icon that looks like an eye, next to the top layer (which was visible in the first frame; in my case that's the layer with Claire).
Clicking that will make the eye disappear (click again to bring it back, if you need to), but will also make that layer invisible (or rather; hide it from view), allowing to let the layer beneath that one come into view.
In my case, Hiro was the layer underneath Claire. With the Claire layer made invisible, Hiro now appears in the second frame of your animation palette! See?
I repeat this process (duplicate frame, make layer invisible) for all my ten layers.
When I'm done with that, my animation window looks like this:
And my layers palette looks like this:
Before we proceed: In my case, I worked with my layers from top to bottom, allowing me to just turn of the visibility of my top most (visible at that time) layer.
If, however, you need to work in a different order with your layers in order to have the animation in the exact order you need it, it's probably best practice to start with making all your layers invisible and making just one visible per frame your working on.
(Meaning that you always keep all layers 'hidden' except for one in the appropriate, active frame. That way you don't run the risk of one layer accidentally obscuring another.)
Moving right along. ;-)
If, at this point, you'd click the 'play' button in your animation window, you'd see that there's animation going. (YAY!) Too bad it's going at a nauseating speed; you can hardly make out who's in the pictures!
So we're gonna slow that down a bit. (It's actually always good practice to set the speed of an animation to something else than 'zero')
To do this, I select all the frames (clicking them all while holding down Ctrl, or click the first and the last one while holding down Shift). Then, on any of those selected frames, I click the little arrow next to '0 sec.'.
A little pop-up shows up. I select '1.0'.
This sets the delay for each frame to one second. (You can of course also set these speeds for individual frames.)
So far, we've (hopefully) got something resembling an animation like this:
Nothing wrong with it, as it's a perfectly acceptable animation. We however, want it less 'choppy', with a smoother transition from one image to the next. ("Do we???" Yes we do.)
This is where the tweening comes into play.
In your animation window, make the first frame active. Then click on the little icons with the four circles (see screenshot below).
A menu will pop up, like the one in the screenshot below. Choose the settings like I had them in the screenshot. (The amount of frames to add is up to you, really. Just remember that more frames means A) a smoother animation, and B) a larger filesize in the end. You'll have to try and see what works for you.)
After you hit 'OK' you'll notice you've got even MORE frames in your animation now. Frame one (Claire) was an original one and frame 7 (Hiro)
as well. The five frames in between were created by ImageReady. It has basically created those by (frame by frame) gradually lowering the opacity of the first frame, showing through more and more of the second frame.
Obviously you could also do this manually, but why on earth would you when you've got ImageReady to do the work for you?!
Next I tweened Hiro (remember to make the appropriate frame active and start with the 'original' image, at full opacity, which in this case has moved from spot nr. 2 to spot nr. 7 due to the insertion of frames) with Isaac and so on and so forth, until I've finally tweened Niki and Peter together.
(The animation is not full circle yet though, we'll get to that in a moment.)
After that I changed the speed on all the newly created frames (since they 'inherited' their delay of 1 second from their 'parents' -the original frames- and that's just too slow).
I set these frames to a delay of 0.2 (this is usually a good delay/speed for these kinds of 'transitional' frames, not just for this specific animation).
At this point I decide I want a border around my animation, because I'm finicky like that. So now what? Take all my images back to Photoshop, add borders and start this whole animation-business all over again?! Nope.
Make sure your first frame is active:
Go to your layers palette and create a new layer above all the others. On that layer, I made a border in white of two pixels (which might be a little hard for you to see if you're viewing this tutorial on a white background -go me-, but trust me; it's there). Because I did this while my first frame was active, it now shows up in all the frames.
Of course this isn't limited to a border alone. Applying a brush or some text would have the same effect. Nifty, eh?
All right, let's go back to the final part of our animation before we wrap this up.
If you watch the animation now, it 'jumps' from the last frame back to the first. In order to a make a smooth, infinite loop, we'll have to do some tweening for the last to the first frame, too.
Now if you've examined the 'tween' menu, you've probably noticed that there's also an option to tween with first frame. This seems like a logical option to use in this case, no?
DON'T DO IT!!!
I mean, you could, but it's not a very good idea. I find that using that makes for a weird transition. I'm not sure what exactly happens, but it seems to me that it cycles backwards through the images. It will at least incorporate more frames than just the last and the first, which totally clashes with what we've doing so far with the other tweens.
Luckily this easy remedied to get our animation just perfect:
Voilá. Perfectly smooth transition from the last to the first image.
We're done!
All we need to do now is optimize it for the web. (The optimize palette should be on the top-right in your screen.) See the screenshot below for the settings that I've used.
When done with optimizing, go to File-->Save Optimized As.
Done!
I hope this is useful for some of you!
Truth to be told, there aren't that many tutorials with working images in the community's memories anymore (which is just what happens, in time), so I figured I'd try and see if I could do something about that, since the questions about ImageReady pop up quite often.
Expect one or two more from me on the same subject in a while.
Disclaimer: Since this tutorial wasn't written for icons perse, your end result (if you follow this exactly) will not adhere to icon-standards when it comes to filesize and image dimensions!
This is mostly because I use a whole lot of frames... The principle/technique still stands though and can be used perfectly well for icons with some adjustments.
We'll be making something like this:
- Rather image-heavy
- Fairly lengthy
- Assumes little to basic familiarity with ImageReady
- Feel free to ask questions in the comments if anything is unclear
If you haven't done so already, fire up your ImageReady. If your animation palette isn't there, activate it by going to Window-->Animation and checking it, as shown in the screenshot below.
Next, you'll have to get the images you'll be using into ImageReady. I'm going to assume you've already prepared your images as far as colouring and such goes. Also make sure all your images are the same size dimension-wise.
The easiest way to get multiple images in at once, is by using 'Import Folder As Frames' as shown below. Because I did not have all my images in one folder, I opened mine up and dragged them all into one window, which gave me one image with ten layers.
This is perfectly doable, but like I said; 'import folder as frames' is much faster.
If you used 'Import Folder As Frames', you'll already have a handy dandy animation in your animation palette by now.
If you did like I did, there will only be one frame in your animation palette, which should correspond with the topmost layer in your layers palette.
For reference, my layers palette looks like this at this point:
This is my animation palette so far:
You create a new frame by clicking the icon that looks a bit like a note paper (see screenshot below). This will duplicate the frame that preceded it, so this is normal behavior! (In other words; don't think you've messed up, hehehe...)
Also note that the newly created frame will automatically will become the 'active' frame (hence the blue borders), which is quite essential if you want to change something about this particular frame. (As an aside, you can activate any frame at any given time by simply clicking on it.)
So now we've got two exactly the same frames. That does not an animation make, n'est-ce pas? We want the second frame to have a different image.
So head on over to your layers palette and click on the little icon that looks like an eye, next to the top layer (which was visible in the first frame; in my case that's the layer with Claire).
Clicking that will make the eye disappear (click again to bring it back, if you need to), but will also make that layer invisible (or rather; hide it from view), allowing to let the layer beneath that one come into view.
In my case, Hiro was the layer underneath Claire. With the Claire layer made invisible, Hiro now appears in the second frame of your animation palette! See?
I repeat this process (duplicate frame, make layer invisible) for all my ten layers.
When I'm done with that, my animation window looks like this:
And my layers palette looks like this:
Before we proceed: In my case, I worked with my layers from top to bottom, allowing me to just turn of the visibility of my top most (visible at that time) layer.
If, however, you need to work in a different order with your layers in order to have the animation in the exact order you need it, it's probably best practice to start with making all your layers invisible and making just one visible per frame your working on.
(Meaning that you always keep all layers 'hidden' except for one in the appropriate, active frame. That way you don't run the risk of one layer accidentally obscuring another.)
Moving right along. ;-)
If, at this point, you'd click the 'play' button in your animation window, you'd see that there's animation going. (YAY!) Too bad it's going at a nauseating speed; you can hardly make out who's in the pictures!
So we're gonna slow that down a bit. (It's actually always good practice to set the speed of an animation to something else than 'zero')
To do this, I select all the frames (clicking them all while holding down Ctrl, or click the first and the last one while holding down Shift). Then, on any of those selected frames, I click the little arrow next to '0 sec.'.
A little pop-up shows up. I select '1.0'.
This sets the delay for each frame to one second. (You can of course also set these speeds for individual frames.)
So far, we've (hopefully) got something resembling an animation like this:
Nothing wrong with it, as it's a perfectly acceptable animation. We however, want it less 'choppy', with a smoother transition from one image to the next. ("Do we???" Yes we do.)
This is where the tweening comes into play.
In your animation window, make the first frame active. Then click on the little icons with the four circles (see screenshot below).
A menu will pop up, like the one in the screenshot below. Choose the settings like I had them in the screenshot. (The amount of frames to add is up to you, really. Just remember that more frames means A) a smoother animation, and B) a larger filesize in the end. You'll have to try and see what works for you.)
After you hit 'OK' you'll notice you've got even MORE frames in your animation now. Frame one (Claire) was an original one and frame 7 (Hiro)
as well. The five frames in between were created by ImageReady. It has basically created those by (frame by frame) gradually lowering the opacity of the first frame, showing through more and more of the second frame.
Obviously you could also do this manually, but why on earth would you when you've got ImageReady to do the work for you?!
Next I tweened Hiro (remember to make the appropriate frame active and start with the 'original' image, at full opacity, which in this case has moved from spot nr. 2 to spot nr. 7 due to the insertion of frames) with Isaac and so on and so forth, until I've finally tweened Niki and Peter together.
(The animation is not full circle yet though, we'll get to that in a moment.)
After that I changed the speed on all the newly created frames (since they 'inherited' their delay of 1 second from their 'parents' -the original frames- and that's just too slow).
I set these frames to a delay of 0.2 (this is usually a good delay/speed for these kinds of 'transitional' frames, not just for this specific animation).
At this point I decide I want a border around my animation, because I'm finicky like that. So now what? Take all my images back to Photoshop, add borders and start this whole animation-business all over again?! Nope.
Make sure your first frame is active:
Go to your layers palette and create a new layer above all the others. On that layer, I made a border in white of two pixels (which might be a little hard for you to see if you're viewing this tutorial on a white background -go me-, but trust me; it's there). Because I did this while my first frame was active, it now shows up in all the frames.
Of course this isn't limited to a border alone. Applying a brush or some text would have the same effect. Nifty, eh?
All right, let's go back to the final part of our animation before we wrap this up.
If you watch the animation now, it 'jumps' from the last frame back to the first. In order to a make a smooth, infinite loop, we'll have to do some tweening for the last to the first frame, too.
Now if you've examined the 'tween' menu, you've probably noticed that there's also an option to tween with first frame. This seems like a logical option to use in this case, no?
DON'T DO IT!!!
I mean, you could, but it's not a very good idea. I find that using that makes for a weird transition. I'm not sure what exactly happens, but it seems to me that it cycles backwards through the images. It will at least incorporate more frames than just the last and the first, which totally clashes with what we've doing so far with the other tweens.
Luckily this easy remedied to get our animation just perfect:
- Create one more frame in your animation palette, right after what was the final one until now
- With that frame active, go to your layers palette and make visible the same layer that is visible in your first frame (in my case Claire)
- Your first and last frame should now be identical
- Activate the frame that used to be the last one (Peter in mine) and tween it with the exact same settings as we used before (tween with NEXT FRAME)
- Finally, delete the frame at the very end (Claire) by activating it and clicking the trash can-like icon
Voilá. Perfectly smooth transition from the last to the first image.
We're done!
All we need to do now is optimize it for the web. (The optimize palette should be on the top-right in your screen.) See the screenshot below for the settings that I've used.
- Animations ALWAYS need to be in .GIF format
- I try to keep as many colours as possible (as much as the filesize restrictions will allow me to keep)
- The setting under .GIF I always keep set to 'selective' (because the others just make the icon look darn weird and ugly...
- The dither is up to you: For this I decided that 'noise' was my best option. This will vary from graphic to graphic, so experiment with what looks best to you
When done with optimizing, go to File-->Save Optimized As.
Done!
I hope this is useful for some of you!