How to Animate

You can do some simple animations with Page Builder. Here are instructions for making the eyeballs as shown in the sample. Below you will also find instructions for doing the same thing on another server in your FM.

First you will need a sequence of images. It does not matter if the sequence are gif or jpg. However the final output of the animated image MUST be a gif, otherwise it will not animate. Most animations will not be able to be transparent because the images are stacked on top of each other and, unless they all cover the same area in the image, they will show through. These eyeball images are all the same size and location so it is able to be transparent. I am not going to go in to the details of creating the images used in this sequence. Some of these eyes were just annotated on a page, and some were manipulated to get the effect that I wanted either by rotating it or annotating on top of it. Once you have read through this tute you can practice animation with any image by taking it to an IM Studio and under transform hit the flop button, and then output that image. Now use that and the original to animate.

For this example You wil need to place your sequence of images on a PageBuilder page by themselves (gray background). There are two rules to remember. First the images must be in numerical order; and, second, they must be placed on the PageBuilder page in numerical order, so be careful to upload them to your Scrapbook in the order you want them to animate. This means they must also all be gif or all be jpg at this point. Here is a sample of my eyeball sequence on a PageBuilder page: EYE SEQUENCE

ANIMATE: Once you've got you PageBuilder sequence page set up, go to Denisov or Siggies imaging and click on an IM Studio with no URL in the box. Once inside you will get a error message saying that image file was not found. Click on the input button above. On that page there will be a place for a URL. Put your URL in there like this:

Make sure there is a / (slash) at the end of the URL. Then hit the view button. On the next page, your first image should appear. Hit the output button above. Save this as a gif (only gif images animate). Check the multi file box. Scroll down that page to the delay and loop boxes. In delay put a number for the speed. 100 is about 1 second between images in the sequence. You can click on the word delay to find the highest number possible. 50 is fast at about 1/2 second. In the loop box make sure it is 0 for a continuous loop. Then output your image. On the next page you will see a sequence of images. Click on the top or first one. This is the animated image. It should begin to animate on the next page. Here you can hit the back button if you want to change the speed. Otherwise upload it to scrapbook and discard your sequence images if you are through with them.

If you have access to a Server with a File Manager it may be a little easier to get your images in the right sequence as you can name them yourself. They must have a numerical name however. If you want to repeat an image in the sequence make a copy of it and give it another number in the order you want it to appear.

First, you will need a Directory just for the animation so create a Directory and call it animate. Transload your sequence of images to that directory. Name them in order, such as: D1.gif, D2.gif, etc. In that directory you should have a file called index.html. Go in to that file and reference your images as in this example:

Follow the instructions as above for taking the URL to an IM Studio. In this case it should look something like this:

http://name.server.com/directory/