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Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Creating animated GIFs using Blender and Gimp

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This tutorial will guide you through how to make a simple animated Gif Using Blender and Gimp. This is useful for creating Avatars for forums etc. This tutorial assumes basic knowledge of blender and Gimp, see the basic animation tutorial.

To start off you will need an animation, this usually should be no longer than 25 frames long.

  1. Open Blender. and delete the default cube and add a UV sphere, the default settings for the sphere work fine.
  2. Now set the camera size in the scene buttons (F10) to 50 by 50 (I am creating an avatar for deviant art where the required size is 50 by 50 pixels, you may change this if you want)
  3. set the frames to start at frame 1 and end at frame 20.
  4. select the sphere and insert a LOC keyframe at frame 1 and 21, then go to frame 11, move the sphere and insert another LOC keyframe. this will create a looping animation.
  5. Set the image type to PNG or JPEG (it doesn't matter) and render the animation.

Now to combine the images into an animated GIF using Gimp.

  1. Open the first image with gimp.
  2. Now click File-> open as Layer or press "Ctrl-Alt-O". Select the next frame and it will be added as a new layer. Repeat this for all of the images, or select all of the images by pressing "Ctrl-A".
  3. If you press Filters->Animation->Playback it should play the animation. It will probably have a low frame rate making it "choppy". this will be fixed in the next step.
  4. Change the frame rate to 40 ms(25 frames per second). Choose file->Export as-> "Name".gif, then choose Save as Animation.

Note: Don't know wheter this is an additional feature of Gimp 2.6.8 or not, but i found out following: In Gimp 2.6.8, within the export wizard, you have to choose option: -save as animation- first and next at the option: -single picture where not mentioned- the option: one single picture per layer. -Sorry i use the german version of gimp-

You should end up with something like this:

Alternatively, you may try using addons to create animated Gifs directly from Blender. 2 options include Spritify and Bligify

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