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This blog includes a series of videos and references to help new users or enthusiasts better understand how to use open source and free technology tools. The quick links includes more information for accessing many of the tools covered along with other references to learn more for taking advantage of these tools.

Click HERE to see the full list of topics covered!

Creating Animations in GIMP

 

This article and video is a bit more artistic / creative compared to more of the recent ones. Most recently we've been exploring server-side services and writing scripts. This article looks to tackle creating GIF animations using GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).

The video above plays pretty quick because I just created a very simple scene for demo purposes. The possibilities are really infinite. You could use those same steps to make a banner add for your company, or create a web animation that plays on load of a website. It could also be used for doing some animations with Apps like on iOS or Android (though GIFs in Android need a webview to run). Even something as simple as just quick UI or text tutorials can be done - that's how I made the simple animations in my BASH script blogs. 

Hope this can be helpful for some of you out there. I think GIMP is a wonderful tool - unfortunate name, but wonderful tool - that really can do some outstanding photo and image manipulation. It's also open source and free to use on Windows, Linux and MacOS so if you learn it once you can use it anywhere.

Final image from the tutorial - playing around with the number of frames and delay between frames (currently 180 ms) can create a smoother playback.

SpaceAnimation