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 [...]]]>

Source Graphic to Convert to SL Texture

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!

12 frames total, tiled at 4 x 3, transparency maintained - goal!

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.