DKC Atlas Forum

Animated GIFs are great way to bring sprite art to life; they are simple, widely supported among browsers and operating systems, and generally of a small file size*.
* This is of course determined by how much visual information they contain — dimensions, number of frames, number of colours, etc.

Examples

Here's one I made many years ago (as seen here, posted by scigamerfan07):


And here's another I posted yesterday, illustrating the subtle differences in the unused Cranky's Video Game Heroes screen recently discovered by Kingizor:



Animated GIFs also help bring the DKC Atlas mapping project to life.

As you can see, they are handy for showing character animations, and for comparing images.

Limitations

Perhaps the main disadvantages of GIF files are the limited colour palette they offer (256 unique colours per frame), and the lack of alpha transparency, but when working with 16-bit video game graphics, these limitations are very rarely an issue.

Make your own

There are a bunch of different ways to create animated GIFs, but I would recommend using GIMP (Graphic Image Manipulation Program), as it is a powerful, free, multifunction program, and will be of more creative use than just assembling GIFs.

At some point I hope to provide a tutorial or two that are specifically tailored to sprite-based animations, but in the meantime, these links ought to help you get started:

Download GIMP

GIMP Simple Animation Tutorial
GIMP Advanced Animation Tutorial

Anyone wishing to create a more sprite-specific tutorial for GIMP, or for any other software, feel free to post it in this topic.

All questions, suggestions, etc. regarding animated GIF software and techniques is welcome here, too.

Sharing your GIFs

For those of you wishing to share GIFs you've created, we have the following topics:
DKC-Related Custom Animations (for customised DKC animations)
The Random Thoughts Topic (for all manner of nonsense, including non-DKC animations)

Note: This topic was created to be home to a discussion that had already started; the next four posts were made before this original post existed.

As I was looking at your comparison GIF, Qyz, I heard the ticks of my house clock moving. The ticks were perfectly timed to the switch in frames. This is a "per second" GIF.

How do you create animated GIFs, by the way? I have to start doing them for my "other" project.

I've split this off into a new topic for discussing GIF animation software and techniques, and have started to add some resources to a newly-added "original post".

You're quite right about the GIF's 1 FPS timing. One of my favourite sites has an article which might be worth taking a look at. I personally use Photoshop, but GIMP is a worthy, free alternative.

Edit: The steps they provide are largely geared toward converting video files into short GIFs, but the software recommendations, and much of the advice is still relevant.

I use Photoshop for animating gifs. There are free programs similar to Photoshop that might do the trick. One program I know of is photoplus from serif. I don't know if you can animate with the free version, though. Some of the options are only availabe in the paid version, which is still way cheaper than Photoshop (but still not nearly as amazing of a program).

What about when I have to use individual sprites instead of from film? Do I follow the same procedure?

The procedure will be at least a little different, depending on what software you use, and how you source/organise the sprites you wish to work with. GIMP, for instance, will let you choose File > Open as Layers... (Ctrl+Alt+O), then select multiple image files (or a preexisting animated GIF); this will import each image/frame to a separate layer, which GIMP will recognise as frames when exporting as a GIF file.

I'll probably have a simple guide to the finer points of the process up in the next day or so, but feel free to ask if you need advice. I'm sure you'd be able to work it out anyway, but sometimes it makes more sense to get direct tips rather than having to wade through so much semi-relevant documentation.

I'll try and have something up by the end of the week... if I can.