JIMINATOR
03-21-2003, 06:53 AM
Making a SSam Avatar
1) If you play with plr_bonlysam, you may want to turn this off
2) Third person mode will probably look more interesting
3) Record a demo of the scene you want to capture.
Hit F7 to start and F8 to finish
Include some time before your scene and after
4) move the demo file from the temp directory to the demo directory
5) restart sam
6) set resolution to as low as you can go, yet still view a decent image
the demo will generate a ton of images. At a high resolution, it
will not be able to write to disk fast enough to capture all of the
frames at a high frame rate
7) set /dem_iAnimFrame=0
8) set /dem_fsyncrate=20
I use 20 here because you can experiment with the final product,
and by deleting odd frames you can make it 10fps or 5 fps.
9) Run the demo
10) Cycle to the correct character with the + or - keys
11) Stop the demo when you have seen all that you want to see
12) Exit Sam
13) Copy all of the demo screen shots to their own subdirectory
14) delete unnecessary leading and trailing images
15) batch crop/scale the images if possible
16) I used adobe imageready for the rest,
It should be possible to use other similar programs
17) use the import folder as frames function to grab all
of the images into one bitmap
18) Select all of the images in the animation clip
You can do that by clicking on the first, holding shift
and clicking on the last.
19) click on the delay and set for all. 20 fps = .05, 10 fps = .1, 5 fps = .2, etc
20) You can crop and resize the image here, it is just going to be slow
and if you have too many images loaded it will be real slow going
21) select images and hit the trashcan to delete them if necessary
22) Do a file->Save optimized as->and specify name - that will save a gif
Experiment with different frame rates, scale and cropping to
get something that looks good & is as small as possible
23) If you are >50k, congrats, you can upload it as an avatar
>50K, then you need to know (or be) a sysop, or have some webspace
as an alternative I picked up a free signature image hosting account,
and uploaded my image there. go to sighost.us, and they will give
a mb of disk space and a gig of bandwidth/month, free. Just don't
use any caps in the username they assign.
24) some people have suggested using flash to reduce image size. I have experimented
with 3 different utilities, and they all generated the same size files as the gif...
Enjoy...
1) If you play with plr_bonlysam, you may want to turn this off
2) Third person mode will probably look more interesting
3) Record a demo of the scene you want to capture.
Hit F7 to start and F8 to finish
Include some time before your scene and after
4) move the demo file from the temp directory to the demo directory
5) restart sam
6) set resolution to as low as you can go, yet still view a decent image
the demo will generate a ton of images. At a high resolution, it
will not be able to write to disk fast enough to capture all of the
frames at a high frame rate
7) set /dem_iAnimFrame=0
8) set /dem_fsyncrate=20
I use 20 here because you can experiment with the final product,
and by deleting odd frames you can make it 10fps or 5 fps.
9) Run the demo
10) Cycle to the correct character with the + or - keys
11) Stop the demo when you have seen all that you want to see
12) Exit Sam
13) Copy all of the demo screen shots to their own subdirectory
14) delete unnecessary leading and trailing images
15) batch crop/scale the images if possible
16) I used adobe imageready for the rest,
It should be possible to use other similar programs
17) use the import folder as frames function to grab all
of the images into one bitmap
18) Select all of the images in the animation clip
You can do that by clicking on the first, holding shift
and clicking on the last.
19) click on the delay and set for all. 20 fps = .05, 10 fps = .1, 5 fps = .2, etc
20) You can crop and resize the image here, it is just going to be slow
and if you have too many images loaded it will be real slow going
21) select images and hit the trashcan to delete them if necessary
22) Do a file->Save optimized as->and specify name - that will save a gif
Experiment with different frame rates, scale and cropping to
get something that looks good & is as small as possible
23) If you are >50k, congrats, you can upload it as an avatar
>50K, then you need to know (or be) a sysop, or have some webspace
as an alternative I picked up a free signature image hosting account,
and uploaded my image there. go to sighost.us, and they will give
a mb of disk space and a gig of bandwidth/month, free. Just don't
use any caps in the username they assign.
24) some people have suggested using flash to reduce image size. I have experimented
with 3 different utilities, and they all generated the same size files as the gif...
Enjoy...