I like that idea DW, I wish it would've worked out better for you...in fact, I like how you experiment with your size, and borders alot. Gives me ideas sometimes.

My latest....i like these a little more than the ones on the last page.....

Do a motion blur on sonic background might do the job

Also the quality of the sigs should be usually saved as a PNG file for better quality picture and lower file size . ( I have a ripped sprite of that sonic picture also )

This was Cyber_EV1L's request



Tell me what you think.

I like !!

Big time, If he doesnt wear it ....I would.

sweet, love the background

That's pretty badass. I wish I had more time to learn how to make really cool sigs like that.

What is that and what is it from?

its a character from Devil may cry 4... angelo somthn.... the one winged angel

It's Angelo Credo the One-winged Dark Knight

My 15 minute sig

Just mocked this up while trying to learn to use c4d's properly. I just can't get the hang of them since i prefer sigs that blend, and i know that c4d sigs require blending it just doesn't do it as smoother.

EXTREME

Did you do the light source yourself ? its brilliant...I went on my Firefox just to check it out without the edges...I love this sig.

You have inspired me.

I honestly didn't do much. The render had a small light source on the hair already and i just mass smudged the edges, put a reflected gradient overlay, changed the angle and lowered the scale of the gradient, set it to overlay and there was my light source. You can see the reflected gradient if you look closely from his hair going diagonal down right to his cape. All i did was saw something i could use and maximized it to a greater potential.

Reflected gradient....never herd that one before.

I guess ive just lost my touch.





I dont know, its like i dont even know how to make sigs anymore.

Not a sig but i thought it was worth some merit.

Cyber_EV1L's requested avatar



This is the 0.1 attacking animation delay. See the sig request thread to see all the delays.

...and it is beautiful.

Looks good man. I think you should go to the next step. Try editing the content in your animations. It usually starts off as a "group edit"(all the layers of the animation just selected--not merged, and then edited together)....but once you dig in-to it, you can edit pieces of the animation, before you animate, and while you're setting everything up.

Until you find a technique you like, and a rhythm that allows you to do them easily....it's probably gonna be tedious. But some of the stuff I do seems way easier to do than it looks(I think anyway). Most importantly, it puts your special touch on things so people recognize that you did that.

I question though: Are we supposed to see the two frames at once when he's swipes his sword?

And one big recommendation:

Your file size is huge on that avatar(something like 97.0kb). What you wanna do is, simplify the animation by taking less-significant frames out of the image. You also need to be aware that extra layers in the pallete makes the animation heavier upon upload. Like the text in that image.

A few things make the image heavier actually, now that I think about it.

1. "Effects": Fading, flipping...any and all of that needs to be considered, and minimized as much as possible. I normally don't even use them cuz they cost so much on the file size.

2. "Colors": Find a way to simplify the colors in the animation...without jeopardizing the overall image...you'll be pleasantly surprised when you find a good technique here.

Find where it allows you to manipulate the pixel values on upload. (look for something like "Photo and Line Art Presets". 32, 64, 128, and 256 are the common numbers that GIF's deal in.....other things that can dramatically change your outcome are: Dither, Matte, Colors, and Lossy. they are usually together.....little extra things I play with from time to time are "Compression Rates" and "Download times". These things don't effect much most of the time, but a little goes a long way sometimes..y'know?

Anyway, alot of colors are harder on GIF files, so they bring the quality of the image down when your image(animated or not) has alot of gradient fades in them. Especially when things are animated though.

32,64,128, and 256 are how many colors a GIF file will display once it's uploaded to the net. Max is the 256. It's why PNG and JPG files fare better most of the times...cuz they can interpret, and display more colors.

For your avatar Bushin, I only needed to display 128 colors. It let me do that fade in your avatar. Which I did manually instead of using a default effect, also saving KBs(kilobytes) on upload.

3. "Layers//Frames": then of course there's this monster to tackle. Like I mentioned...alot of "stuff" sitting in there that you're not gonna see during any one point in your animations, boost the file size like you wouldn't believe. Doesn't matter if you have it clicked off so you can't see it...it's still there, boosting up the file size when you upload it. Basically, if we're not going to see it at all...delete it out of the image. Don't merge it with anything, because that makes it a "bigger" picture(like a bigger actual square of a picture)...just delete it.

That's bad for this site if you wanna do a request for someone cuz they'll get shadow-banned and not know why. When you make people stuff, and after you upload the images, Right Click on each of the images>>go "Properties">> and then look for the "Image File Size". Then add up the KB sizes of both the sig and avatars that you make for someone.....

If those images kb sizes add up to be over the 120kb limit for this site.....back to the drawing board to figure out how to preserve space for the person who is going to wear your stuff.
Gets aggravating with animated images cuz it's tedious to figure out what to take out of the animation process. lol You could do some fantastic piece of work, and have to go back and erase it...just because it made the size too big.

Right now, wearing your images, Cyber_EV1L is over the limit and will likely be shadow-banned if he doesn't take something out.

================Finally here=========

For all that fancy talk I just did, the point is set up, and finding a balance between all that stuff that lets you do what you want with your images...

For me, it's why people will wait a ridiculous amount of time before they get a requested animation done....because I'm trying to make the thing look good for them....while figuring out that balance for their particular image (cuz it all depends alot) so they can wear the thing on here.

It's for that "balance" that I'm trying to get to, that I usually save my Signatures as PNG files or as JPG files. JPG is the more constant norm though cuz the file size is waay lower than a PNG. But keeps waay more of the image quality than a GIF.

PNG:



JPG:




Hope I sent you into a decent spiraling vortex of hopelessness.....

Nooh I'm just kiddin'....I really do hope anything I said helps you and anyone else here.

I question though: Are we supposed to see the two frames at once when he's swipes his sword?

Yes thats how the animation plays out.





Lol i know and i'll be fixing it soon and i'll certainly be paying more attention to it in the future.

A few things make the image heavier actually, now that I think about it.



Umm i'm not sure where i find this exactly. To my memory you use ULead GIF animator if i'm not mistaken. I'm using imageready so.... although i do know about pixel values and what it does i'm just not sure where i change it lol.



I understand what you mean but with this GIF it was difficult to do since i had to move the background to keep the sprite in proportion to it's movement but i will admit that there were places where i could have did this and i'll be more aware from now on.



I was worried about file size when starting so i honest;y don't know why i didn't check it. Probably because i was so happy that i made my first actual animated avatar i just wanted to get it out there lol. Yeah i definitely need to pay more attention to that.



I'm on it Captain.



Yeah it did help =) thanks

^ Love the new concept and nice use of the marquee tools as well.