Excuse me, which animation or game is this GIF from? ?

How to use the simulator and external tools to make GIF animation

I've wanted to write this lesson since the simulator GIF animation website was opened, but I'm lazy, so I've been dragging it to the present. Without further ado, let's get to the point at once.

the first step:

of course, it is to organize your ideas and make clear what you want to do.

Step 2: Select the tool

Capture Tool. For the most popular CPS2 and NeoGeo simulators at present, NeoRAGEx, Nebula, WinKawaks, FBA and MAME have been revised. Except MAME uses hot keys, all others have capture factories specially designed for capturing pictures. Among the first four, WinKawaks has the most powerful function of removing layers.

GIF animation tool, the selection surface of this one is much wider. Everyone has different choices according to their personal preferences and habits, but as far as I know, Ulead GIF Animator is used more, and I have been using it all the time. This tool is really functional and easy to use.

let's take these two tools as examples to start the actual operation.

Step 3: Grab the picture

This step can be said to be the most critical!

Run WinKawaks and set the background color from the menu "Video". By default, the background color is black. However, because black is often used in moving blocks, such as people's hair, it may cause trouble when setting a transparent background in the later production process, so we set it to pink.

Load the game, and adjust the size of the game window after loading, which can't maximize the game window, otherwise the snapshot factory window will block part of the game screen. You can refer to the following figure for specific adjustment, that is, you can display these two windows on your screen at the same time.

close the snapshot factory window and start playing the game. Before the material you want to capture appears, use Shift+F5 to start recording, and then press Shift+F5 again to stop recording. Now press Shift+ F7 to play back the video just now, watch it several times repeatedly, don't let go of any detail, and see every movement of the characters clearly. You can also download the video online. When you can understand the whole process, you can start to take pictures. Pause the game with the Enter key, and Shift+ Spacebar will slowly advance to the first image to be captured. First, remove layers 8×8, 16×16, and 32×32, which are generally background layers, blood slots, energy slots, and people's heads next to them (different games and different models may be different), so there is no need to keep them. Then there is a box with a scroll bar, which shows the active block in the current image. Click "Blink Show Selected Layers", and the selected active block will keep blinking. Unwanted active block can be stopped from being displayed by directly double-clicking it; If you want to suppress the display of multiple active blocks, you can select these active blocks as you normally select multiple files with Shift or Ctrl in the Explorer, and then click the button "Suppress Display". When there are only the objects you need to keep in the current image, click the "capture" button, and this frame of image will be saved to the hard disk. The specific storage location is in the capture subdirectory of the simulator (you can also set the location of this directory yourself). It should be noted that there are two ways to capture the picture. One way is to capture the picture just now, which saves the image according to the original resolution of the game. There is also a filter snapshot, which saves the image according to the resolution of the image stretched by the display card hardware. Because the resolution of the latter is high, the size of the saved file increases accordingly, and the GIF produced by random frames of images will cost hundreds of K or even megabytes, which is too large and is not recommended.

Click the "Next Frame" button to advance to the next frame of images, and then repeat the above operations until all the images are captured.

the process is a bit troublesome, but with the increase of proficiency, you will find that not every frame of image needs to be captured, which can save a lot of trouble. The biggest advantage of using this method is that only a few simple steps are needed to generate animation in later post-production.

another way to capture pictures is to use HyperCam to capture images to generate AVI files, and then import the AVI files into GIF tools to generate animations. This method is really very convenient when capturing pictures, but you will be very painful in post-production. If you don't use the snapshot factory, it is impossible for the simulator to completely close all unnecessary layers or moving blocks (especially in the game of CPS2), so there will be a lot of "garbage" left in the captured image that you must get rid of. What should we do? Use Photoshop and other tools to clear it frame by frame. . .

By the way, I'd like to introduce a little trick, which can make it a little easier to lock the game scene into a scene with fewer background moving blocks by using cheating code. This one is especially useful for the game of CPS2 with the most moving blocks. For example, the scene with the least moving blocks in Junior Street Fighter No.3 Middle School is a police storm scene.

Step 4: The first few steps of the post-production

operation are illustrated with pictures.

after running the program,

add a file

select whether to shake the color

select the delay time between frames

click the "Finish" button to end the animation wizard and enter the main interface of the program. As shown below

a. Use the Shift key to select all images as in the snapshot factory. In "Global Information", you can set the number of animation cycles, which is infinite by default; You can also set the background color of the animation file. The background color here refers to the background color displayed when you look at the animation file by using drawing tools, such as ACDSee. Choose a nice color.

B. Put a ditch in the "transparent index". The default is to treat the color as a transparent color. In general, the color captured by WinKawaks happens to be the background color that needs to be removed-pink. In edit mode, you should see that the original pink background layer has been removed, as shown in the figure. If the automatically set transparent color is incorrect for some reason, click the small pink square on the right and a color selection tool will appear. Click on the pink background layer again to correct it.

C. if the images in each frame of the animation are to be displaced differently in the transparent area, set the moving mode to "to background color". As shown in the above animation, the X-axis and Y-axis displacement of each frame in the transparent area are different, so "to background color" must be used at this time. Otherwise, the images in the transparent area will be superimposed when displayed. If the image in each frame of the animation does not shift, but only changes in the local part of the image, and the moving mode is set to "Cannot be deleted", this moving mode is used in all the game scene maps collected at this battle point. Generally speaking, the movement mode should be set to "to background color".

D. If everything goes well, we should start optimizing the image now, and see how many colors are used in each frame of the image, and then decide how many colors to use in optimization. Several preset schemes are provided in the optimization options, please choose according to the actual number of colors.

These are just a few steps. If there are blank areas, please cut them out and then you can save them.

The following are the questions that my friends have asked me recently, and put them here for your reference.

Q: There is something about the global palette in the general parameter setting, which I don't quite understand. Does it mean all the colors in the picture? What does it do? Is it true that the more colors, the brighter the pictures?

A: The global palette is mainly used to optimize the file size, and the palette is used to store color information. When you create a GIF, each frame of the image uses an independent palette. The more frames, the greater the amount of information saved, which is bound to waste a certain amount of space. So we create a whole palette, and save all the color information of frames into it, like hundreds of K GIFs, which can reduce the space of tens to hundreds of K before and after creation. The number of colors in the global palette is not as bright as possible, because there are only a few colors, so it is enough. You can browse how many colors are used in each frame of image, and determine the number of colors in the global palette based on this. If the overall effect is not affected, the number of colors in the global palette can be reduced (that is, fewer colors are selected during optimization). File optimization is very important, which is also one of the criteria to reflect whether a GIF is well done.

Q: in the advanced parameter setting, what is onion skin?

A: before the onion skin is displayed as a translucent afterimage in edit mode? The frame (which can be set by yourself) image is designed to facilitate you to compare the changes before and after the frame.

Q: in the advanced option of optimization, there are dithered frames. What is this?

A: The dithering frame has actually been explained in the animation wizard. Like the GIF animation we do, there are at least 16 colors. In order to make the colors transition smoothly, we need to choose this one.

Q: also, what does it mean to stagger the preview? I think it doesn't make any difference whether you choose it or not.

A: You should have noticed when browsing the web. Some large GIF files first display a vague image when they are not fully loaded, and then gradually become clear as the files are gradually loaded. This is called interlaced playback. This is meaningful for a GIF file with only one image, but I don't think it is useful for an animation file with multiple frames. If you save the file in a staggered way, the file size will be slightly increased.

Q: I will automatically change the background color to black as soon as I optimize it. What should I do?

A: the background color can be set by yourself. Select the global information at a. in the above picture, and then click on the small pink square on the right at b. Choose for yourself.

Q: how to cut it?

A: first, select all the frames to determine the blank areas that need to be cut out. Then click the "Scissors" pattern switch on the right in the edit mode and operate in the pop-up window. Very simple, so I won't describe it in detail. In order to be accurate, you can cut out the blank areas of the top, bottom, left and right in four times, and don't cut out the areas with images. Finally, the "X- offset" and "Y- offset" of all frames are adjusted to , and the clipping work is declared complete.

Q: how to remove the background layer of the super game?

A: use ZSNes(SNes9x doesn't have the function of capturing pictures, although it can close the layers). It closes the corresponding layers with the number keys 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 on the keyboard, and 6 resumes the display. The method to capture the picture is to close the layer first, then press F1 to bring up the menu and select "Snapshot/Incr Frm", which means to capture the current picture and move on to the next frame; If you want to skip directly to the next frame, select "Incr Frame only". That's it. It's still relatively simple. However, ZSNes's function of closing the layer is not very powerful, and sometimes you have to post-process it yourself.

q: how to remove the background layer of GBA games?

a: GBA uses the simulator Visual Boy Advance version .9 or above, and its hotkeys are Ctrl+1 to 8. At present, the simulator does not have the function of continuous image capture, nor can it pause the post-progressive video frames, so it has to use tools such as HyperCam mentioned above to capture images continuously. (Supplement: the latest version .91 already supports progressive video frames)

Let me talk about two very important issues at the end:

1. The problem of deleting transitional frames

When making, you will find that many consecutive frames in the image just captured are the same or have little difference, and these frames cannot be completely preserved, so you should delete some of them.

For the same continuous frame, only one frame can be reserved, and all other repetitions can be deleted, and at the same time, the delay time of the reserved frame can be adjusted to n times of the original (n is equal to the number of deleted frames +1), so that the display effect obtained is consistent with that before deletion;

For similar continuous frames, because the difference is relatively small, even if one of them is missing, it will pass by when playing continuously, and people can't observe it at all, so it doesn't matter if it is deleted.

All the above is to make the size of GIF as small as possible, and at the same time, it can also increase the fluency of animation (if you feel slow or stop where you shouldn't, it's because there are too many frames left! ）。 However, we also need to pay attention to the scale of deletion. If the deletion transition causes the animation to drop frames, it will be bad.

2. Difference in display speed

Many GIF animations are displayed at different speeds when viewed by browsers and drawing tools. The viewing speed in IE is quite normal, but when viewed by tools such as ACDSee, it is either slower or faster. After collecting your GIF animation, most people should generally use the drawing tool to view it, so after making it, use IE and ACDSee to view it separately. If the difference is too big, it needs to be adjusted. Here, I recommend that you use 1 milliseconds as the base of the delay time between frames, so that the speed difference of the animation produced by this method is very small when viewing with any kind of drawing tools.

★ That's it. The function of Ulead GIF Animator is very powerful, such as using the X or Y axis displacement of the front and back frames to "create" the frames that are less caught when grabbing pictures, and so on. There are many skills, which need to be studied slowly by yourself. After all, practice depends on individuals.

reference for making fighting game background GIF

Brother p>Flash.S asked me to write a strategy for making fighting game background GIF. It's rare for me to respect my younger brother so much, so I obeyed!

In order not to repeat too much with the original Raiders of Big Brother Flash.S, I will talk about my own methods. I know that many people have different methods from mine. What I am talking about here is not necessarily the easiest method, but just my own words. Welcome to correct me.

Tools:

The simulator uses winkawaks1.43, which mainly depends on his snapshot factory, and a slightly older version is also acceptable; GIF related tools are gif movie gear 3&; Ulead GIF Animator 5

Let's take the making of the scene of Yuan Lao Man in Street Fighter 3 as an example:

Steps:

1. Set the background to pink, read the game rom, and start the game. You can use cheat to select the fighting scene you want to make, and then enter the scene to prepare for the screenshot.

2. Press the hotkeys alt+1, alt+2, alt+3 and alt+4 to block out the four main layers respectively, and press it again to restore the corresponding layers. First, make both characters stand on the far left, and pull the background to the far left. Use hotkeys to capture a picture when only the first, second and third layers are displayed. Note that if a layer is active, you should press Enter to pause the game, and press Shift+ Space to skip the frame step by step to make it live.