Major Upgrade to Animated GIF to Animated SL Texture Conversion Tool: v0.4

I finally had some free time for the first time in years. I’ve done some major upgrades to some of my products – trivia got a major overhaul, and now, I’ve done a much needed upgrade to the animated GIF to SL texture conversion tool.

It now handles GIF transparency correctly after quite a battle to get it to work, but it does. Give it a whirl:

http://www.peregrinesalon.com/anim/

As always, it is free, and with transparency now working, a lot more useful.

There are still some known issues – the amount of frames in the animated GIF has to be something that will form a grid properly (IE, 49 frames will tile nicely at 7 by 7, 48 frames will tile nicely at 8 by 6, however, 47 frames will NOT tile nicely at 47 by 1).

Also, GIFs that are saved with progressive scanning now work – so if you used to see problems with white pixels appearing on frames after the first in your conversion, they should work as well. I’ve tested it with quite a few, and those two major problems seem to have been fixed. Your mileage, as always, may vary… but let me know how it works!

For those who are curious in what was needed to get this all working, the trick was to convert the GIF to a GIF making sure it is coalesced so each frame is full, then convert all those frames to the PNG with transparency, and then assemble all of those frames through a montage into the gridded texture file.

To the left is an example of how a final graphic might look of the source animated GIF to the right, of lovely Corsican singer Alizee – although I’ve resized it down from 512×512 for the web site, and put the transparent checkerbox in the background.