HD Gifs?

[Mowri Panache]

Hello fellow Residents:

I already know how to create animated textures from a GIF but I’ve never been able to create one that looks clear or HD. They’re always blurry and grainy. 

Does anyone have a way to create higher quality animated surfaces? 

(I’ve used Gif2Ani and the Outworldz script) 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

3 hours ago, Mowri Panache said:

Hello fellow Residents:

I already know how to create animated textures from a GIF but I’ve never been able to create one that looks clear or HD. They’re always blurry and grainy. 

Does anyone have a way to create higher quality animated surfaces? 

(I’ve used Gif2Ani and the Outworldz script) 

Essentially, NO.

First problem, is resolution, SL only supports power of 2 resolutions, with a max of 1024

so you have some cool image at 640x596... SL will upload that as a 512x512, which reduces quality and makes stuff fuzzy.

Then there is file format, SL uses JPEG2000, which is a terrible format, with lossy compression, so it will reduce quality and make stuff fuzzy.

Then you have the animation problem, a normal gif shows each frame one over the other, in a sequence, animated pictures in SL are usually more like film strips.

 

So you have that cool 640x596 10 frame gif, that gets converted into a 6400 x 596 strip, then that is uploaded and becomes 1024x512, and looks bloody awful.

So, stuff like gif2ani, tries bypassing that by making a multi line strip, say 4 per line for example so it ends up as 2560 x 1788, which resizes to 1024x1024, and still looks awful.

 

There is no way round this really, all you can do is minimise the damage.

make sure you export at 1024x1024 from gif2ani, and don't use videos or gifs whose frames wont all fit in that size without excessive reduction, trying to fit 30 frames of 1080P video into a 1024x1024 is cruising for a quality bruising.

 

No HD gifs in Sl.

[Mowri Panache]

Thank you 🙏 

That was a thorough and well thought out answer. I was afraid of that, but wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing something vital. It would be so great to be able to have some decent animated images but I can definitely see why it’s not possible. *cries in a corner* 

[aht1981]

ok there is a way you could do this, but it will be glitchy with more than a few avis in the room. I have a script that changes the image in a projector and the image is displayed on the projector face as we know. i've seen this used on disco floors and seemed pretty cool but they had it set to changing every second or two. I used it to make a caustics projector for a swimming pool. 10 images and the rate of change set to 0.0625 (to give you 16fps). So you could do this. The problem I had was it was glitchy as each image loads (esp at 0.0625) so somebody in these forums suggested using a prim with the images on. I made a prim with 10 texture spaces and loaded each image on and hid it in the floor. it works fine! It's a problem when more than a few avis show up and it will be jumpy in those circumstances.

Here is the projetor in action. I've moved it higher up and made it visible https://gyazo.com/254f96a00402d25324e0cc1dfdc7d898 i action https://gyazo.com/398aa699b25f6522377bb6b659d1606e

Edited December 2, 2023 by aht1981

[elleevelyn]

another way is the 3rd example of https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetTextureAnim

Quote

 

This divides a texture into 64 "cells", 8 across, and 8 down, and flips through them, left to right, top to bottom. This is useful for cell animation.

llSetTextureAnim( ANIM_ON | LOOP, ALL_SIDES, 8, 8, 0.0, 64.0, 6.4 );

 

a 1024x1024 texture 

divided 8 by 8 = 64 128x128-pixel frames 

divided 4 x 4 = 16 256x256-pixel frames

chaining the textures via script if more say 256-pixel frames wanted. 2 textures gives 32 frames, 3 gives 48, etc

Edited December 2, 2023 by elleevelyn
cant count on my fingers