Simple animated graphics via OSX + text file

May 31, 2013 4:33 PM

Sometimes I play around with pixel art, usually in Pixen. It's great! It also has some built-in animation tools, but as soon as I want to do something with more than, say, a dozen frames, it becomes very unwieldy.

Ideally what I'd like to do is have a bunch of images in a folder, and a text file with lines like:

frame 1: image1 for 0.1 seconds
frame 2: image2 for 0.5 seconds
frame 3: image1 for 0.3 seconds

...and so on. Hit a button, and this hoped-for app would batch-create my .gif. I don't want a GUI or dragging-and-dropping, just straight text input for setting these up. If it was smart enough for me to set up sub-batches, so I define "walk1" as a series of frames and durations, and then call "walk1" instead of having to manually write in each walk frame, even better.

What's out there for me to use? I know Preview can do animated gifs (to.. some extent?), so is this something I could make a script for and run from the terminal? I'm familiar with Lua and can write something that would do exactly what I wanted, but I'm not sure how to go about actually making the .gif for distribution.

posted by curious nu to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

You could do this with gifsicle by making a script which would construct the proper command line for it. Gifsicle also supports concatenating gifs, so you could make a "walk1" gif and splice it in when needed.

The same could also be done with Imagemagick, which, as you can see from the page I linked, has tons of options.
posted by zsazsa at 4:50 PM on May 31, 2013 [1 favorite]