start a new page in an explosion of color

Crap, did we just switch roles? Ryat, we need to work out a system here.

and yet another small catch containing

six ratfish,

four raakjackets,

two stuntfish,

and one each of dark electrofish, bisofish abd carbofish

pity they were all chasing each other, but it was a colourful show, that the cyats then ate.

HarPO

Meh, it just shows the flexibility of our godships.

Sprinkle a dash of Chaos and Mayhem from it's master and it's a wonderful stew of WTF!!!!

That is disturbing in so many ways.

I can barely bear it.

Don't panda r to him.

if you have to break it up like that, it's probably a no go...

bah!

Laa-dee-freakin-da.

Yo Stant, while back I did the I-Fish, did you do the blink thing yourself and how long did it take...Been messing around with Gimp combining pics to get a hang of it.....His my first attempt using Gimp with these two pics....

Never mind. Forum lag.

Your mom lags.

Yes I did it myself and it took two and a half, maybe three minutes to do it, test the animation, and get it just right.

That was quick.

I'm not very experienced at doing animations at all, but I am the resourceful type who learns shortcuts and improvises tricks quickly to simplify a project.

That fish, for example...

Pre animation set up: (In photoshop)

1. I noticed the eye was pretty much perfectly round, so I used the oval select tool and selected only the eye.
2. Then I selected the layered via cut option.
3. I followed that up by reversing the layers so the eye was the background and the fish body was the foreground and added a layer in between them to create my eye lids. (That's improvised trick number 1.)
4. On the middle layer I basically just made two square shutters, one that will drop down from the top, and one that will push up from the bottom and set them up so they would be just above and below the eye respectively and not visible in the finished product.  I used the eye dropper to grab the exact same colors as the scales and did my best to replicate a similar pattern with the brown over the gold but didn't waste too much time on it since the blink was happening fast.  Just did enough that visually if you focused on it, you could see a pattern that was similar to the rest of the fish to make it look like it belonged.  Why square shutters?  Its easier to do squares then circles and get them to cover up everything especially if they're sliding between layers.  (That's improvised trick number 2, a huge time saver really since you don't have to worry about size.  Going beyond the boundaries of the eye is a benefit rather than a hindrance.) This step took the longest of the whole project for the obvious reason that I had to actually put creative effort into it rather then just let the program do all of the work for me.

Animation stage:

1. I opened up the window and created two duplicate frames of the original.  (Improvised trick number 3.)  This gives me a first and last frame that are exactly the same and a middle one to edit rather then hoping I get things back in the right place at the very end.  This also creates a huge time saver by allowing me to do the next three steps and cheat.
2. On the middle frame, I moved the shutters closed over the eye.  Since it's between the eye and fish layers, the shutters cover the eye, but are themselves covered by the body of the fish giving me the appearance of perfectly round eyelids.
3. Then, as per the shortcut I learned when I first read how to do animations in photoshop, I selected the first and second animation frames and used photoshop's built in "fill in the number of frames you'd like to have between these two automatically" feature and had it add in 3 frames between them which automatically created frames with the shutters now in perfectly spaced positions of a progressively closed state.
4. Repeated the exact same process for the now 5th and 6th frames, which was originally the second and third frames to achieve the reverse effect of perfectly spaced positions of a progressively opened state.
5. So at this point I have frame 1 with the eye fully visible, frame 2 with the shutter sliding between the eye and the fish body giving the appearance of 1/4 closed, frame 3 half closed, frame 4 showing 3/4 closed, frame 5 fully closed, 6th was the same as frame 4, 7th frame was the same as 3, 8th was the same as 2, and 9th is the same as 1.
6. Now since the default time is 1/10th of a second on each frame and armed with the knowledge that the eye sees at 24 frames a second (anything less and you start seeing a choppy animation, obviously the fewer frames the more chop), I changed them all to be 4/100ths of a second per frame (since 1 second divided by 24 frames is .041 something) with the exception of frame 9 which I set at 8 or 10 seconds since rapid blinking wasn't the desired end effect.
7. Then I previewed the animated image on a loop and was satisfied enough with the results to not have to go back and fix anything.

Post animation stage:

1. Saved the project as a psd in case I want to revisit it later and saved it again as a gif.
2. Posted it here.

Wall of text. Informative but still a wall.

And walls are for breaking down!

Yeah, baby!

But walls can also be for protection.

It's only a wall because the ordered list function forces it to be like that.

It works.

Speaking of working, do your job and end this page so Draak can do his and start the next one.