Trimming the Graphics Fat

  • #10, by FantozziSunday, 11. January 2015, 17:57 10 years ago


    You could cut off the image fat (as you are calling it) yourself too, but that would mean that you would have to correctly position each frame, if you used a different canvas size per frame. Personally I use 1 canvas size per animation, as you can always align the animations up later with the animation center &/or the animation studio (harmonizer).


    Not shure if it fits here (my weak english] but I load the image sequence as layers in gimp - cut them all in one act and then export the layers again as separate images. You need a little script for this, you can download here. So all images are identically cutted.

    This takes about 10 - 20 seconds. But as AFRLme wrote, it doesn't affect the file size as much as I thought.

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  • #11, by redsparkSunday, 11. January 2015, 18:05 10 years ago
    That's good to know that gimp can do that too. I do the same thing in Photoshop. It has a script to load several images as layers and then you can trim them all at once to fit all images and then export the layers back out as files. However, if Visionaire does this on its own, then there is no point to doing it in my workflow. It is just one extra step I can skip.

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  • #12, by MachtnixSunday, 11. January 2015, 18:05 10 years ago
    I think the main problem is to set the animation center for every frame in Vis. After cropping you have to reimport all frames and adjust them again... (yeah, I had to do this...)

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  • #13, by afrlmeSunday, 11. January 2015, 18:06 10 years ago
    XnConvert that I use for batch conversion to .webp format allows you to crop, resize the canvas or images. It affects all the images loaded into the program & usually converts & performs all macro actions in under a minute, even if you have loads of images loaded into it.

    But as I mentioned earlier. If you were to crop each frame, then you would have to mess about inside of Visionaire Studio positioning each frame correctly which is not that easy to do, especially considering that you can't use the arrow keys to nudge character animations because of some annoying bug that causes the arrow keys to navigate through the item animation list instead.

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  • #14, by redsparkSunday, 11. January 2015, 18:17 10 years ago
    Machtnix, that's why it would be better if Visionaire handled it. If it crops, it can handle the adjustment to the centres by keeping the centre points in relatively the same position.

    AFRLme, you don't have to mess with the centres when you trim within Photoshop. If you trim all of your frames in one image, it gives the smallest canvas that will contain every frame as if they were one image. Then you export them out, there is a little amount of alpha around each frame that the centre points are still relative to each other. You don't have to nudge anything around for each frame. Just line up centres between animations as usual.

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  • #15, by afrlmeSunday, 11. January 2015, 18:27 10 years ago
    Yes I know. I meant if you were after trimming individual frames within an animation. For me, it's just easier & faster to keep the same canvas size for all character animations, that way you can use the same character animation center, for each animation.

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  • #16, by MachtnixMonday, 12. January 2015, 11:02 10 years ago
    Using the same canvas size for every animation is a good idea. But recently I had a very big animation with big items and objects to interact with. I could use this large box now for every animation, that means: every other frame gets a large transparent canvas which is unnecessary. The other way is to use smaller frames for every pose except the large one. That was hard work, because it was nearly impossible to joint the animation centers together...

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  • #17, by redsparkMonday, 12. January 2015, 11:12 10 years ago
    Yes, there is a lot of wasted space in my artwork too. But it is all you can humanly do. smile Visionaire needs to take care of the rest.

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  • #18, by afrlmeMonday, 12. January 2015, 11:32 10 years ago
    If you provide one of your idle frames inside of the large animation then you know where to set your animation center & have something visible that you can use for aligning the animation up to the idle animation or whichever animation it needs aligning to. I often do that because it's much easier than trying to line up two completely different animation frames.

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