you can fly!? DarkSnow - the Screensaver
starting with a single digital painting by Mark Hamilton, how to make an
animation with Project Dogwaffle, and turn it into a screensaver with Irfanview


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A tutorial to create this animation and save it as a screensaver



The Tutorial


part 1
-
getting started
part 2
-
making selections & the alpha channel
part 3
-
blurring a selection in the alpha channel
part 4
-
creating an animation
part 5
-
more snow in the foreground
part 6
-
making an animation loopable
part 7
-
save as image sequence
part 8
-
using Irfanview to create the screensaver
part 9
-
more advanced tricks: light diffusion, day for night
part 10
-
shining some light rays from the window
part 11
-
working with frames & adding more drama


Part 1: Getting Started


For this tutorial, we'll be starting with a pre-existing image in Jpeg format. It may have come from your cell phone's digital camera, or soemthing you painted in Dogwaffle or another source.  We'll be using an image created by Mark Hamilton, named Dark Snow.


Opening a Jpeg Image

When you use the File>Open dialog to open an existing image from file, Dogwaffle first looks for image files of the TARGA file format: *.tga

In order to see the Jpeg image files as you navigate through the file system, you'll want to switch the 'file type' to  'Automatic' which can detect and over 60 image formats, thanks to the image conversion facility from ImageMagick which is included in PD Pro and several prior versions (but not in the freeware version 1.2)


Select the desired image and open it.

Store the Image

Once you have loaded the image, you might want to immediately store it. That will grab a snapshot of the current image buffer in memory. It won't save it to disk but it will have it like a backup snapshot in memory for quick and easy restoration if you want to re-use it.

store the image
PD Pro doesn't let you work on multiple documents at the same time, i.e. it is not multi-document enabled. However, given that you have only one mouse and only one place to click and paint at any moment in time, the ability to store multiple images sure comes close to the needs of artists who think in multiple projects at the same time.

Resizing & Resampling

In the same Image or Buffer menu you'll find the Resample... option. It lets you resample the image to higher or lower resolutions, all the while resampling it so things don't get to look too blocky or pixelated too easily.

We'll reduce the size of the image to 640x480 pixels  for this exercise. The goal is to have something that's about half to a quarter the size ofthe target resolution. If the screen is expected to be 1024x768 or 1280x1024 in resolution, this will work nicely.  In fact it will also work for higher-resolution, larger screens such as the 22" monitors which reach 1900x1400 resolutions or similar, but of course it will look much better if you use a higher resolution for more detail. The question is whether your computer will be able to handle the bandwidth to push the animated image sequence of the screensaver we're creating, pushing the images perhaps at 20 frames per second through the system bus into the graphics frame buffer.



Making the window larger to see the border around

We may want to do some painting or selecting at or near the borders of the image. It may be helpful to have extra space around the image and the window decoration. Grab a corner of the imagge buffer's window and make it larger. This will reveal the grey zone around the image. You can't really paint in it but you can still use it as part of a selection as we'll see next.


next step: making selections in Alpha channel


part 1
-
getting started
part 2
-
making selections & the alpha channel
part 3
-
blurring a selection in the alpha channel
part 4
-
creating an animation
part 5
-
more snow in the foreground
part 6
-
making an animation loopable
part 7
-
save as image sequence
part 8
-
using Irfanview to create the screensaver
part 9
-
more advanced tricks: light diffusion, day for night
part 10
-
shining some light rays from the window
part 11
-
working with frames & adding more drama





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