Scene editor guide. Page 8

Animated GIF

You have seen so far that small changes made to any parameters of the scene produce small changes to what appears in the frame window.
You can use this to generate frames for an animated GIF.

Do the following to try:

Create a scene adding objects, setting lights as you saw in this guide.

Set the desired Width and Height of the GIF.
The default is 150 by 150 pixels, you can make it as big as you need but keep in mind that the frame generation is very slow and it will take a very long time if the size is too big.
I suggest you to experiment with the default values or smaller ones the first times.

Press the New button, this will create the GIF in memory and enable the Snapshot and Save buttons.

Press the Snapshot button: after a while (the amount of time depends on the dimensions of the GIF) you will see a reduced copy of your scene in the space over the scroll bar: this is your first frame.

Now make a small change to the scene: slightly change the position of an object for example, and take a new snapshot.

Repeat this process for the numbers of frames you want.

At any time you can choose to view the single frames or the resulting animation, simply choose Animation or Frames in the View box.

When Frames is selected you can use the scroll bar to select one particular frame.
The frame delay field shows and sets the amount of time the frame is displayed for. Assign the values you want to each frame then view the resulting animation.

Once you are satisfied with your GIF you can save it: press the Save button, you will be presented a dialog box in which asks you the name and path of the GIF.

The generated GIF defaults to "loop forever": if you want to change this or refine some other aspects or simply optimize the size of the file (definitely you will have to do this !) to put it on the web use an animated GIF editor.