[quote name='crystalklear64']well well well this is a pleasant surprise. nice work on the snow as well, i see you found a way to keep the flakes solid and still use gimp?
i just use paint and then throw the image into my .psd of the snowing animation in photoshop. the base image, however, gets done in paint so you should be good. what do you mean all scratchy?[/QUOTE]
He must be having the same issue I had when working with paint where it would artifact like a MOFO and look like someone puked all the colors up after it's been saved. I'm kind of curious what version of windows he's using, I'm on 7 and the second you save it as a .gif it converts it to look like shit.. Here's the same picture saved as a .gif in paint and the original is on the right...
THAT said... if you're gonna use paint, I recommend saving it as a .png file either way and it shouldn't be a problem for anyone to animate after the fact.
Thanks again CK, your mini-lecture helped out big time and I went back and cleaned up all my previous paint puked .gifs and saw how much work it is on each image to undo all that mess. Getting the animation down was really eating at me too so I grinded it out until I found a way to make it work. What I ended up doing was making an eight layer image of just the snow fall so I could make sure everything lined up and then I saved each layer as its own gif file. GIMP has the ability to animate but I really didn't feel like figuring it out since using unFreeZ does the job and this whole process takes about 1 minute start to finish anyway. So I take the base image and open all 8 snowfall gifs as layers at once.. make the base image visible and one of the snowfall layers visible and then saving the image and checking off "flatten visible layers" when prompted, then I hide snowfall gif 1 and unhide snowfall gif 2 and repeat the saving process. I played with the different paint brush tips until I found one that didn't produce that transparency or "airbrush" like effect where it fades at the edges and I think it ended up being the pencil tool with fuzzy circle tip.
I tried to 'cheat' and see if I could pull the snow fall out of an animated gif you already did to stay consistent but it would have been more work than it was worth. I think I saw 12 frames in your animation and I envy your patience with the time it must have originally taken as doing 8 frames of 15 snow flakes was a PITA in itself.
I was hoping to get more done and I'll try this week. As much as I like Kronenbourg, there's only so much french beer and penis decorating I can do in one weekend before I should probably start questioning my decision making...