A local swim team is changing up their name and logo and I thought it would be fun to create an animated GIF to put on their web site during the transition but I’ve never dabbled in this type of thing and wondering if anyone here has and has pointers.
The logo’s are similar in that they both have a small graphic design and some text so the animation would play out like this:
3 seconds: Logo1 shows
2 seconds: Logo1 text rolls across the graphic to the left off-screen leaving just the graphic
5 seconds: Logo1 graphic compresses into a funnel/stream to the right and expands into Logo2
2 seconds: Logo2 text rolls in from the left
5 seconds: Logo2 shows
3 seconds: Logo2 dissolves and logo1 appears
repeat
Not sure if this is something for Blender, xmorph, Gimp or something else. Thoughts?
There are probably dozens of different ways to do it.
These are the ones I am familiar with but there are a ton of other software that can do it.
Blender or Davinci Resolve (not OSS but free version) for the animation and Photoscape (not OSS but free version) to create the GIF.
Just a heads up that animated GIFs are not really size optimized so it will be a large-ish file. Other file formats are better optimized for size but then the hosting site has to handle the looping. The animation can be made so the start and end frame are the same.
I have not played with Xmorph and disliked GIMP UI so haven’t used it in years so don’t know their capabilities.
P.S. Let me know if you need an assist when you start. Not great at any of it but been doing this kind of stuff for while.
Thanks Oscar! I’m sticking to a small size with original logos on a 300x300 pixel scale so the initial animation would be shooting for 600x300 as one logo morphs horizontally to the other. I have part of the new logo in SVG format and I’m going to try using Inkscape to vectorize the text of the both new and old logos since I can’t get fonts for either. I have also have to convert the old logo graphic into a vector format and complete it since in its original format the text occludes part of the logo graphic and when the text scrolls off screen I’d like there to be a complete logo graphic ready for morphing.
The scrolling Text is probably the easiest of the operations so I will start looking at that first. As you know, I have dabbled in Blender before so it makes since to try it.
Years ago I did an animated GIF using a command line tool on Linux so once I have a directory if images I don’t think the conversion to GIF or MP4 will be a problem.
Awesome time for graphic developers. There are a ton of options.
Basic animation (moving an object) in Blender is actually super easy. Set a keyframe at the beginning location and then a keyframe at the end location.
For the morphing parts there are many ways to address it depending on how exactly you want to do.
I am a huge fan of Duck3d channel. He holds your hand and clearly explains how to make the different effects.
I’d done a quick gemini search on how to use Blender to animate 2 SVG files and saw that it was just a keyframe adjustment thing so was super happy that’ll be pretty easy. I know the morphing or dissolve will be tricky.
I’ve thought about the transmission and think doing a form of dissolve would be fine. Dissolving the first logo starting at the end of the graphic closest to where the 2nd logo graphic will appear.
Still dissolving into a stream like line then regenerating into the new logo starting at the far right of the graphic and finishing on the left of the graphic. All so that the particles don’t obscure the remaining parts of the logos as the dissolve and appear.
I have to build a prototype of a heat chimney for a single 700W micro-inverter and get it installed before I can get onto this design work. Hoping to get to it this afternoon.
I’m still on it @Oscar but with delays since I can’t have just one project at a time nor have everything work. While moving the micro-inverters to handle the heat chimneys one of them decided to blow their AC output FETs and fuse. Parts come in from Mouser tomorrow but took time evaluating.
Have now blown the dust off my K40 laser and have cut a small stencil and after lunch I’ll be trying to learn how to do airbrushing of waterproof temporary tattoos on swimmers.
I do now have all the Logos and text as vectors and just need to put a white background around one so it obscures the graphic as it’s original design does but then leaves a completely whole graphic ready to dissolve into the new logo graphic.
So I have the 4 SVG files but when I import the graphic of Logo1 and then the text of Logo1, I’ve joined their parts and then set their Origin to the Geometry and they weren’t line up over each other but figured it out. I had created a new image in Inkscape and copied the text parts to it.
Instead, I copied the logo1 SVG, positioned the text into where it was supposed to be and deleted the graphic. Now they’re lined up and I can offset the Z and continue.
It’s been an interesting 4 hours. I got the text zooming off to the left, the graphic1 spinning and graphic2 fading in but it got messy. My graphic1 object had to be brought in as 2 svg files because they are different colors so I did that and made one the parent of the other to just work on it as one object. Except when I had to go to the shader workbench to do animation and fading. The child/parent relationship didn’t follow so I had to duplicate things.
I had the graphic1 spinning and was going to have it throw sparks as it faded but after many nodes built and connected it didn’t work. So I’ll try another day and maybe something different from sparks throwning around.
Yes, I made my attempts in Blender. As you’d seen the initial text motion animation was easy and just used key frames and setting the start and end positions. It got rather complex trying to create some form of morphing between graphic1 into graphic 2. Blender file attached:
Nice. Not the easiest software to use but very capable.
The attached file looks to be in pdf format and not blend file.
Quick hint and common way for basic animation is to parent an object to an empty and then apply the animation commands to the empty. The object should follow.
Most times easier though like most things…it depends.
I couldn’t attach a ‘.blend’ file so I changed the name to ‘.pdf’ but it looks like it can’t be downloaded and renamed. doh.
I did learn about ‘parenting’ when I realized I needed so many different layers so colors of the SVGs were represented. Guessing the creating the empty is helpful because naming is cleaner?
Not sure why the parenting broke when I had to get into the shader for trickier animation either.
wow, that was crazy. I tried editing the post of the fake PDF file by deleting the attachment then adding the blender file but the result was to trigger as a PDF file.
I even renamed the blender file and tried uploading that and it too swapped to the PDF name.
Trying it here in a new msg:
[didn’t work]
Crazy thing, it renames the attachement to the previous name with the PDF extension. Even with a flush cache and hard reload the same morphTest1.pdf filename appears as the attachement. Odd.
I was on Blender v4.3.2 and just updated to Blender 5.2.0 LTS
Changing the version and resaving the file then uploading allowed the cache test to fail and present the new ‘.blend’ file.
I also tried importing the same SVG files which lost colors of layers and now, with v5.2.0, it brings in the SVG files with proper colors and layer sections. Sweet. It’s just getting better and better!
The old logo is the crowned thing which I had spinning. The new logo is the stingray.
I’ll have text of the new team name slide in under the stingray unlike how the name is partially over the old logo.
The more I think about it, maybe I should spin the old logo, fade it out while the main body of the new logo is spinning and starts appearing over it and slowly shifts to the right and upwards so it stops with the tail at the y axis line high enough so that the team name text can come sliding in from the right.
This way I wouldn’t have to go into the shader stuff because that’s where I got lost.
