Animated .gif Textures

dejai · Post by **dejai** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 9:10 am

Does irrlicht have plans to implement, .gifs and .gif animations into the engine, I think it could be a nice implementation. A video of this working with Valves source engine can be found here. Oh I can't find the link but source has this feature

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 9:30 am

Nope, unlikely to happen as a standard image loader any time soon.
If there is a gif loader available under a liberal license, we'd still need a way to load the frames as a load of separate textures or as part of a larger texture, and a way to reference the frames.
So it would have to be external, added in a hacky way, or need some changes to the API

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 10:58 am

An IMultiImage or something should be possible and also useful for other purposes (e.g. cubemaps, separate channels, maybe mipmaps). But I still wouldn't favor gif as a format. MNG has the same features, but is free and uses better algorithms. But of course you can do all this stuff already now, by splitting the animation into single images (or a large one) and use the textur animation stuff. Someone recently posted a texture animation creator from animated meshes, so you wouldn't even need to use gif animator tools.

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 1:14 pm

by all means

don't use animated gif:

256 colors forced reduction, that's terrible for many reasons.

It's nice as it retains the timing pause per frame, if needed, but mng does also.

When even APNG is out , working fully (there's a free windows editor) in firefox 3 beta, going back to gif is...

I'd have my vote for plain PNG file sequence. I know dds are more optimal, but ppl may have issues finding tools...image magik I think would help here, plus some free nvidia tools..neither I dunno if for particles case dds in irrlicht would be an advantage(dds is used more optimal by 3d card, I think) and ppl dealing with alpha channels will have more issues with game engines...

While Virtual dub can export a full long vid in PNGs, and even more, blender can render particles *with* alpha channel, ready to go, as PNGs (or tgas, etc) , so would be direct.(add to it the great power in particles, hair rendering, demolition, cloth, etc, that is being adde to blender lately... )

My 2 cents

edit: any format adition is useful, but if counts optimizing efforts, and you have to choose, I'd go for direct control through the engine of th multi image effect (ie, be able to blur particles move in case of water, is probably what lacks as more important in many water demos)
So, imo a serie of pngs is more flexible and has more quality. In the least case, MNG, but I think is worse as in the case we memntion, not animated toons, is not worth the hassle...there's very few mng free tools...and good ones, none, imo. Irfanview can preview averagely well MNGs, but not all MNGs.Depends on the tool that exported. (or merely, ecrtain tool exports MNGs that wont work on irfan)

The flexibility with series of PNGs is better, pipeline wise: You can edit in Gimp , Paint.net or PS, any isolated frame or chung of frames. you can output from blender, PS (useful batch Actions here) , a video editor (you will loose transparency in this case) , etc. you can mix outputs of all, with no probs.

What i think could be nice is engine addition to blur between thos image -frames, sort of way more real.

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 8:21 pm

The LZW patents have expired, and it would be a nice format to support eventually out of convenience. I agree it has no real technical benefit because of the limitations vermeer mentioned.. but there's loads of gif images out there so it would be a feature worth boasting about, and would be useful for tools that use Irrlicht.
Not really a top priority though.

JP · Post by JP » Sun Jan 20, 2008 11:28 pm

Yeah i wouldn't think gifs are worth supporting really, they're pretty bad compression and give you really bad artifacts sometimes.

I found a really useful website which unpacks gifs into their seperate frames and have used that a lot to use animated gifs in irrlicht with the texture animators.

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 1:41 am

for that, you may use surely image magik (free, cross platform, command line converter and editor/fixer) , or also surely: Gimp with the anim module, Animation Shop, Irfanview, or Image ready (comes with PS.)