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My honest hope
is that you'll give Xara X a try. When you do,
be sure to try building some animated gifs. On this page are some of the
ones I had fun creating with Xara. In each case, I was experimenting with
the program to learn it better and discover what I could do with it.
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With this 6k animation I tried to make effective use the "whitespace" of page having the "rip" become one with the page background. It also shows that a graphic's animated component can be just a small feature on a larger image and still be quite effective. The animated version of this graphic is only marginally larger than a non-animated version.
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This is a 12k animation I made with my five-year-old son. By the time we were done David had a really good grasp on how animations are made. We actually created it backwards - starting with the complete name and the having the "sticks" fly back into an imaginary hole. The animation has over 400 objects on 18 frames. The frames display for varying times from 0.1 seconds to 2 seconds. It wasn't hard to organize all those sticks. We drew a mushroom shape out of three curves and then kept the movement of all the lines within the shape. When the frames were all created we simply eliminated the mushroom shape.
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To create this little 5k animation I scanned in a pair of scissors and then imported the bitmap into Xara X where I was able to manipulate the scan and animate it.
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This is my son David giving you a little kiss. It further demonstrates that Xara X can effectively work with photographic images. I'm still amazed that a vector-based program like Xara can even do this kind of thing! The most common vector-base programs around are CAD software like AutoCad or Intergraph and they certainly can't touch the flexibility of Xara's creation. This 13k animation has just two frames. It also clearly demonstrates Xara's very slick implementation of the gif standard. Gifs are normally a poor choice for photographic images - jpgs are better. Xara's gif export however does a pretty good job on photographic images. Photograph-based animated gifs aren't commonly seen on the web because most software used to create animated gifs can't handle them well : At least not without excessively large file sizes. Xara makes it practical.
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I can't resist showing you the very first animated gif I created in Xara. I should have started with something less complicated - but then again, it was a good learning experience. I was fed up with seeing looping animations that jarringly jumped from their last frame back to the first. I wanted the looping action to look smoothly continuous. To enhance the effect I ended up having two bikes so that by the time one was out of sight the other was already visible. Both bikes are based on the same bitmap. With hindsight, I probably should have masked out the "6" on both bikes to enhance the animation looking like a continuous stream of racing bikes. The look of movement was accomplished just by changing the position and size of the bikes as the proceed across the 10k animation.
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I find Xara X's proficiency with animated gifs quite amazing given that it is really a general purpose illustration program. It doesn't just give you the capability to export an animated gif - it gives you what you need to do it well. It really allows you to get the most out of the animated gif format. In conclusion, I hope this page has provided you some insight into the creative flexibility you can enjoy with Xara X. I'm confident you'll love it as much as I do.
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Proceed to the next page : Vector Format Graphics for the Web ... |
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