Sorry, but I really had to register only to ask that question apart from the fact that you guys have quite some insight in game mechanics and I read here a lot.

I see these perfectly animated avatars with your ingame characters and wonder if you could please tell me how you create them.

wow model viewer, background set to something absurd like cyan, slow animation, pause-screenshot, paste into photoshop, remove crazy background color, paste as a frame into animated gif program, rinse, repeat.

Thanks a lot for the quick answer. So you really take each frame. Damn, I thought there might be an easier way ;)
Can you recommend a good Gif-Animator or do you just use Image-Ready?

I use image ready, some people use Ulead gif animator, they look the same.

you will find that it isnt too bad unless you want some really detailed movement. Also it is very simple to do and just requires repetition.

But make sure to compress it so you don't end up with a 750kb image.

coughloughcough

Hey, in case you are interested, the newest version of the model viewer does everything for you. Choose the color of your forum as background color, choose model and animation and save as animated gif. Works perfektly for me.
Check these out, it took me like 1 min per gif, the light blue background color is the one of my forum:




Just make sure you resize to 512x512 first and then when you save you resize again to 120x120. If you do other then that, the picture is unsharp, dont ask why.

K, I'm too stupid to enter the links, but you'll get the idea...

I think image posting was disabled for a while because of all this .wmf virus bullshit going on.

How many frames did you use?

All of it will depend on how detailed you want the movement. you can have it as short as 4-5 frames but it will look kinda jerky. The more frames and the shorter the movement in each frame the smoother it will get.

:edit: oops misread your question and didnt think that you were talking about a specific example.

Wow, that is a nice .gif.

It all depends on what size you want to get. I used 30 frames which results roughly in 180-200 kb, no matter what kind of model you use if you use the full size of 120x120.

If you reduce the frames, it sure does not look as good anymore and the animation itself will run faster, which also does not look so good. There is a delay you can enter, but it actually makes it look worse. (There was something in the notes of the newest model viewer, so maybe it got better).

The thing is, if you have a max kb size, like in this forum, I would still recommend to try size 120x120 and just make the model smaller, so there is space on all sides. Thats because if you go with a smaller size, like 100x100 it seems to get unsharp and I dont know why.
So if you go with 20 frames and make the model small in its 120x120 frame, you can be as small as 50kb and still look good.

Model Viewer