gif animation

[ice3]

What would be the best software to do gif animation? There is almost nothing available for purchase, and those that I found were just an excuse for advertising. What do you guys use for gif animation.

... and what is the best workflow from still to animation. What software and etc. Any and all help/tips - appreciated.

[Kasumi]

I  personally really, really like ASEPRITE.

Totally free, cross platform, automatically loads image sequences (so if you have a bunch of files named "whatever 000", "whatever 001" etc, it will load them as an animation), has palette control and lots of other neat stuff.

There is also Graphics Gale which does pretty much everything BUT gif animation for free. (You can still animate, but cannot save and load gifs.) It's about 25 dollars if you want this feature. I have never used Graphics Gale after finding ASEPRITE, but it's always worth listing alternatives.

There's also Pro Motion which is more expensive than Graphics Gale. Also, I have zero experience with it.

As for best workflow, I can't help too much. Animator's Survival Kit is a good book to learn about general animation. This is a good blog by a member here that's also looking like it will become very good. Actually it already is good, but there are only a few things up at the moment.

[Lachie Dazdarian]

I use GIMP. I copy frames from Graphics Gale as layers to GIMP and save them as GIF animation. It's relatively effective and fast, but then again...not fast as "Save As GIF..." in Graphics Gale, which, as I understand, comes with paid version. I might check ASEPRITE. Wasn't aware of that program.

[PixelPiledriver]

This is a good blog by a member here that's also looking like it will become very good. Actually it already is good, but there are only a few things up at the moment.

Thanks  Kasumi

ice3, personally I like GraphicsGale but you should try all of the programs suggested here to see what works best for you.
As far as the process on my blog... I'm working on it!
It will take me some time to get to the good stuff.

If there's something specific you'd like to know sooner than later my blog is open to suggestions, and within reasonable time I will work on that next.
Or if you have an animation you are working on, post it, and I would be happy to help you out.

[ice3]

Thank's for the replies. This is what I did so far. I'm building a small animation toolkit for myself. I purchased Pro Motion and Graphics Gale. I decided that for pixel art, it's an excellent and affordable investment. A little premature, since I'm a beginner, but I would like a decent set of tools. I'm going to use gimp to scan and fade line art. I basically just set the brightness to a level where the lineart is a faded light gray color and it's simple to pixel over on a separate layer, or just a separate color depending on the program. It's an instant cleanup effect. I also, tried Grafx2. I absolutely love it, plus it's free. The only thing annoying is that the palette affects the gui. Even if the software is strictly pixel art, let's face it - we are using modern computers, so there is plenty of room for the image palette to be separate from the program palette. I found out also in another thread, that the latest 2.4 tests of Grafx2 are implementing single layer animation. So this sounds really promising and I hope to try it out soon.

I'm also building up a link list of tutorials and pixel art info. I'm interested in all blogs so please post links if possible and I'll check them out. Personally I don't have the skills to write tutorials and I won't be blogging, but I might put together a resource website myself with an artist link list; maybe.

I'm very interested in any examples of start to finish.

This is turning into a wishlist thread - lol.

If you can recommend good online video tuts or progress videos, please post. The only thing I try to avoid is videos with timelapses and loud music.

//PPD: merged your posts
PixelPiledriver - I'm on your blog now. Do you have a gallery?

[PixelPiledriver]

This is my art gallery
There's a banner to it in the links section of AniAtlas.
But its not as obvious as it could be I suppose.
Guess I should add descriptions to the links.

[Ai]

I like grafx2's animation support, it's pretty straightforward and effective. Both colorcycling and traditional animation are supported (simultaneously). Only thing it doesn't have is onionskinning.
If you look up Dawnbringer's scripts on Pixeljoint, they add the facility to animate from a sprite sheet (that is, get the frames from the spritesheet and animate that) as well as many other things.

[jams0988]

Graphicsgale is my program of choice, too. It gets my vote! You should decide for yourself, though. Different people like different things! I liked Pro Motion a lot, too!