Looping animation problems

[Adam Bulley]

Here’s the website I’ve designed, with the existing animation so you can see the problem I have.

https://www.winginitduo.com

[Joseph W. bourke]

I can’t see where the loop refreshes – all I can see is the tutorial. Any loop which you try to make seamless is going to have a portion in the middle where you can see the dissolve happening. The trick to the seamless loop tutorial, is cutting the piece you want to loop in half, swapping the beginning to the end, and the end to the beginning, then putting as long a dissolve (I shoot for a minimum half second to a full second) in the middle as you can. If you do it correctly, there will be no jump between the end and the beginning, but there will be an obvious dissolve in the middle.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

The footage you use is too short and the transition is short as well. With clouds especially you need smooth transitions.
You will never get a perfect loop with footage. You may be able to get away with clouds created with Particular, rendered and animated after to move sideways.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Adam Bulley]

Thanks very much for this.

The only problem I had with a longer loop was the file size. I imported the rendered file into Photoshop and exported as an animated gif. The clip in the header just now is about 5mb.

Thanks for the heads up on Particular, had a look on the Red Giant site, looks amazing!

Any ideas how you would create a suitable length clip, at a high quality, without it getting too large? Is there a better method than animated gif? Didn’t want to use flash for obvious Apple reasons!

Thanks for any further help.

[Adam Bulley]

Thanks very much for this.

The only problem I had with a longer loop was the file size. I imported the rendered file into Photoshop and exported as an animated gif. The clip in the header just now is about 5mb.

Thanks for the heads up on Particular, had a look on the Red Giant site, looks amazing!

Any ideas how you would create a suitable length clip, at a high quality, without it getting too large? Is there a better method than animated gif? Didn’t want to use flash for obvious Apple reasons!

Thanks for any further help.

[Mato Kokotic]

First of all, you don’t need whole picture animated, just lower half, minus rock in the middle. So, make cut picture in four segments, per half and rock – static, small part on the left and bigger part on the right – animated. That will reduce file size drasticly.

As for loop: make in photoshop seamless texture (with Offset) of your smoke and animate one cycle with Effect>Distort>Offset. And that’s it.
Since you reduced file size with static parts, you could increase duration of your animation if you wish…