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Tutorials
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For this tutorial, you will need a Painting program ("Paint" comes with PCs), and Jasc Animation Shop 3. If you don't have one of these programs, you can purchase it or download the free trial. (Download Animation Shop here!) This tutorial will teach you the basics of blinkie creation. (blink forward, flash twice). If you want to learn about more creative ways to embellish your blinkies, see our advanced tutorial. 1. To begin, open your preferred blinkie maker. We use this one (provided by coolcherrycream.com). Drag the letters into the middle and arrange them side by side to form your the beginnings of your blinkie. Once you've finished, click "Print Screen" (the little button next to scroll lock). This will copy the entire page. 2. Go into your painting program and paste in the page you just copied. Using a selecting tool, copy just the letter boxes you'd previously arranged. Create a new painting window and paste in your blinkie. Make sure that your image box is no bigger than your blinkie. 3. Now it's time to create your very first frame. A frame is a single step of an animation. An animation is just a bunch of frames. Think of it like a flip-book. You can think of each page as a frame. To start your first frame, flood-fill the background of each letter box with the color of your choice. You will be using 2 colors in your blinkie, decide on them... NOW! Go to File > Save (or CTRL+S) and save it wherever you want (we recommend the Desktop--just don't forget to delete the frame files once your blinkie is done). Congratulations! You have just created your first frame! 4. Flood-fill the background of your first letter box with the other color that you chose. Go to File > Save As and name you blinkie: (desired name here)2.bmp. MAKE SURE you save as, otherwise you'll overwrite the previous frame. 5.To create your third frame, undo the flood-filling of the previous box, and color in the next one. Save as (desired name here)3.bmp. Continue this process until you get back to where you started (where all the boxes are the original color). 6. You're almost done with your blinkie. The next step is to flood fill every box with color B in all one frame. Save as, undo what you just did, and save as again. Repeat this a second time. 7. Now it's time to put all the frames together into an animation. Open Animation Shop, and click the button right below file on the left. This should open "Animation Wizard". Most of the buttons are correctly checked, "Same size as the first image frame" should be checked. Click "Next". Now "Transparent" should be checked. Then, "Center in the frame", "With the canvas color", and "Scale frames to fit" should be checked as well. After that, "Yes, repeat the animation indefinitely". This next part takes more thought. Before continuing, you must first specify the number of 1/100 of a second each frame will last before jumping to the next frame. This number mostly depends on the content in the blinkie. A standard blinkie, like the one you're making now, usually should be set to 5, where as a blinkie that animates a scene, should be set to 15-20. You get to decide. When you're done, click next. 8. Here's where you'll be putting in your frame files. Click "Add Image". This will bring up a browsing window. Find where you saved your files and select the first one. By holding down CTRL you can select multiple files at a time. Using this technique, select all your frame files and click open. Because you numbered your files, it puts them in numerical order. However, the last file name and number in list is really the top. To fix this, just select the file and click "move up". Once you're done, click "Next" and then "Finish". 9. Now you should see all your frames laid out in a strip. To view you're whole blinkie put together, click the "View Animation" button. It's all the way over to the right in your toolbar and it looks like a film strip. If you hover over it, it will say "View animation" 10. You have now created your first blinkie. It's time to save it. Go to File > Save. A gray window should come up. Click the button that says "Customize" and change the number of colors to 255 in the drop down menu. Click "Ok", "Next", "Next", "Next", and finally "Finish". You are done! Having Blinkie Trouble? Click here to find out about common mistakes we, and other people have made. |
