I'm mostly done with what was meant to be my first artisanal submission, and the amount of things I've had to do to get here is dizzying, but now I'm running up hard against the 500K limit.
The Idea: You see a bit of the sky over Lusternia. The camera pans to the right and a constellation comes into view, then it freezes and lines fade in, along with a name, revealing that we're looking at Skull. Then the lines fade and the camera continues to pan. One by one, each of the twelve signs of the zodiac are revealed in this way. The animation will run about two minutes total.
How I Made It: First, I used Celestia to get some images of the sky as seen from Barnard's Star (not from Earth, so you wouldn't recognize any star configurations), and stitched a few captured images together manually to make an image of continuous sky, 8600 pixels wide and 600 pixels high, with bits of nebula and interstellar clouds in carefully selected places.
Meanwhile, I drew out constellations on paper, making them more realistically suggestive of the things depicted than real Earth constellations, but that's not saying much -- few of our constellations have any more than the most glancing similarity to the things depicted, and most have none at all.
Into the long strip of sky I manually edited in brighter stars in those configurations, and edited out bright stars that didn't fit in. As I have little experience with art software, I did this quite manually, just copypasting bits of sky over one another.
After searching for a while to find software that could slice this long image into a series of frames, I ended up having to write my own software in C to do it, by manipulating the bitmap files byte by byte. Actually I wasted a week trying to do it in Visual Basic, so I could avoid having to learn the inner workings of the .bmp file format, before I found that working around Visual Basic's limitations was harder. I finally got the program working yesterday; it took about an hour to produce 8059 separate 800x600 frame images, each one pixel farther right along the original input image than the last.
Then I went through and identified the twelve frames that best frame the twelve constellations. I made copies of those twelve frames and manually drew lines and curves, and added text, to depict the constellations.
Finally, I started to feed these into Animation Shop to produce an animated .gif, using transitions to fade the lines and text in and back out.
The Result: The uncompressed, full-sized version of the first 150 frames, about 1.5% of the entire animation as I originally envisioned it, was just under 6M in size! Compressing it got it to just over 2M. Cutting the size of the frames in half allowed me to get to 350 frames in, about 4.5% of the resulting animation at half size, in 2.5M. By that level of compression, the final size would be 51M. If I drop 3/4 of the frames, keep it at half size, and compress, I could get to 25M. Still 50 times too large!
For the record, here's what it looks like with all the frames, but halved in size, and only showing the first 350 frames:
(Skull looks a little goofy, I might redo that one, but I'm not going to worry about that until I can figure out if this is even possible.)
I hate to give up on the concept and all the work and hours I've invested, but I don't see how to get anywhere near close enough. And I still haven't considered what the conversion from GIF to SWF will do but I bet it'll make it worse! Anyone have any advice?
The Idea: You see a bit of the sky over Lusternia. The camera pans to the right and a constellation comes into view, then it freezes and lines fade in, along with a name, revealing that we're looking at Skull. Then the lines fade and the camera continues to pan. One by one, each of the twelve signs of the zodiac are revealed in this way. The animation will run about two minutes total.
How I Made It: First, I used Celestia to get some images of the sky as seen from Barnard's Star (not from Earth, so you wouldn't recognize any star configurations), and stitched a few captured images together manually to make an image of continuous sky, 8600 pixels wide and 600 pixels high, with bits of nebula and interstellar clouds in carefully selected places.
Meanwhile, I drew out constellations on paper, making them more realistically suggestive of the things depicted than real Earth constellations, but that's not saying much -- few of our constellations have any more than the most glancing similarity to the things depicted, and most have none at all.
Into the long strip of sky I manually edited in brighter stars in those configurations, and edited out bright stars that didn't fit in. As I have little experience with art software, I did this quite manually, just copypasting bits of sky over one another.
After searching for a while to find software that could slice this long image into a series of frames, I ended up having to write my own software in C to do it, by manipulating the bitmap files byte by byte. Actually I wasted a week trying to do it in Visual Basic, so I could avoid having to learn the inner workings of the .bmp file format, before I found that working around Visual Basic's limitations was harder. I finally got the program working yesterday; it took about an hour to produce 8059 separate 800x600 frame images, each one pixel farther right along the original input image than the last.
Then I went through and identified the twelve frames that best frame the twelve constellations. I made copies of those twelve frames and manually drew lines and curves, and added text, to depict the constellations.
Finally, I started to feed these into Animation Shop to produce an animated .gif, using transitions to fade the lines and text in and back out.
The Result: The uncompressed, full-sized version of the first 150 frames, about 1.5% of the entire animation as I originally envisioned it, was just under 6M in size! Compressing it got it to just over 2M. Cutting the size of the frames in half allowed me to get to 350 frames in, about 4.5% of the resulting animation at half size, in 2.5M. By that level of compression, the final size would be 51M. If I drop 3/4 of the frames, keep it at half size, and compress, I could get to 25M. Still 50 times too large!
For the record, here's what it looks like with all the frames, but halved in size, and only showing the first 350 frames:
(Skull looks a little goofy, I might redo that one, but I'm not going to worry about that until I can figure out if this is even possible.)
I hate to give up on the concept and all the work and hours I've invested, but I don't see how to get anywhere near close enough. And I still haven't considered what the conversion from GIF to SWF will do but I bet it'll make it worse! Anyone have any advice?
