darkhawkamd said:
I have both of those and have mastered at least PS, however, ImageReady was just something I never used because I never needed to animate something outside of 3D Studio Max or Bryce before, but since I didn't feel like spending the day, just to make an avatar.
On a regular basis, how many frames are required to animate something, and is 17 enough for the color change at left?
Can you point me to a site with ImageReady tutorials?
And while on Photoshop, how good are you at web page interfaces?
I found the best tutorials in IR's help section. Your avatar has an advatage over some others that means you can use a lot of frames and still have reasonable filesize. The advantage is the fact that a large portion of it doesn't change from frame to frame. To oversimplify, IR's optimization engine will only need to store the data for this portion of the image one time for the whole animation, instead of for once for every frame. As a quick guess, I bet you could easily use more than 30 frames and still have a very small file.
Here is one site I came across that has some very good discussions on optimization. This is the key to getting good looking, but small filesized animations. I can gove you a couple pointers on IR. For instance, it is not like GIF Animator 5 or Animation Shop. It is not brainlessly easy to just drop more images into an animation.
I get the impression that you are making each frame of your animation in Photoshop. The best way to make an animation from those frames is to make a new folder that you save the frames into. Then in IR, do File...Import...Folder as frames. Then things will start to look a little more intuitive. Go to the optimization tab of the open document and to the Optimizer tool window on the right and start tweaking. When filesize and quality are both acceptable, do File...Save Optimized As.
To answer your question, part of my job includes using Photoshop to build web interfaces. I have a lot of experience with it. I make all the usual stuff. Fancy buttons, banners, backgrounds, and anything else I need to. I love PS 6.0's Save For Web action.
One program I don't have that I would love to get my hands on is Bryce 5. I can't really get bossman to spring for it since it's way to much of a stretch to say I need it for work. I've used it a little and have seen lots of things created in it. It's awesome. I have never seen 3D Studio Max before. What exactly does it do?
Now that my fingers and your eyes are tired, I'll wrap this up. The help menu actually is helpful. Just practice a little and you'll get it. I can try and help you if you get stuck. Good luck!
