I Just Wanted to Post an Image Thread

[Ken1171]

Little Edna sends her regards from iClone.

 

[Miss B]

Ohhhh, how cuuuute!

 

[Ken1171]

I bought this CC3 character set when it was in promo for $99, and it includes 5 fully clothed (with hair) toon characters, each with their unique age, shape and personality. The artist has created them out of 2D sketches, and I think they came out quite faithful. It was quite a bite on my budget, but when you just look at them, I couldn't resist.

I am a sucker for toon characters, and Reallusion has built quite a lineup more recently. They have a CC3 base kit for creating your own toon characters (body/head shapes, skins, clothing, hair), and then 3 sets of ready-made characters, each with 4-5 fully clothed characters of different ages and toon styles including hair, where this was the latest from a 3rd party artist. I've bought them all! Ouch my wallet!!

 

[Miss B]

Well she's very cute, and the animation you put her in helped with that as well.

 

[Ken1171]

Thanks! I wish we had some better way of posting animations here. Animated GIFs bloat up pretty quickly, so I have to sacrifice frame rate, image size, and color depth quality to post even the shortest animation to avoid the 1MB file size limit. I have posted the better version at DA.

 

[Hornet3d]

Caoimhe with the first coffee of the morning, or at least what passes for coffee in the colony.

Little more than a test render really to see if everything was back in place and working after my enforced re-install of Windows 10. To give the company that built the computer their due they did replace the faulty SSD in six days and that included a weekend. As I had already sourced a new drive I have used the replacement they supplied to clone my existing 'C' drive in case it happens again. I am hoping not, I expected more than eighteen months from a Samsung 970 Evo M.2 SSD. Only real problem I had was activating Windows 10 again as it was supplied with the computer but a short call to tech support once more solved the problem.

 

[Rae134]

Thanks! I wish we had some better way of posting animations here. Animated GIFs bloat up pretty quickly, so I have to sacrifice frame rate, image size, and color depth quality to post even the shortest animation to avoid the 1MB file size limit. I have posted the better version at DA.

Could you post something to youtube and link it here?

 

[Ken1171]

Could you post something to youtube and link it here?

Imagine if I had to post everything first at YouTube before posting here? That would mess up my channel... Animated GIFs were introduced 33 years ago, and since then we had nothing better? That's hard to believe, considering how much the web has evolved ever since. And now they have also removed Flash as well, so we are left with less options than before, as if we had many to start with.

 

[KageRyu]

There is APNG but sadly support for them has been slow to adopt from software developers and web companies. Same story for MNG, though detractors of that cite the decoder overhead as the reason for not wanting to support it.

 

[Ken1171]

There is APNG but sadly support for them has been slow to adopt from software developers and web companies. Same story for MNG, though detractors of that cite the decoder overhead as the reason for not wanting to support it.

I have heard of APNG, and even got enthusiastic about it. However, soon enough I have found out that it creates files even larger than GIF, so it wouldn't help here. It resolves the limit on number of colors, but the files get absurdly huge. They only recommend it for cases where there are very little changes between the frames, like a blinking character, or a dog wagging his tail, where nothing else moves.

A better animated image format would require better compression, which would probably add some overhead. I haven't heard of MNG. Was it any good? Or maybe it doesn't matter if browsers won't support it. And if there is no Flash, what are we left with?

 

[KageRyu]

Sadly there seem to be few alternative animated image formats. (if you have an old Amiga there's AIFF - not to be confused with AIFF, there's also HANIM - most PC browsers used to be able to decode these into the mid 2000 and I haven't tried lately).
From what I read MNG was a more powerful alternative to APNG but also more complex, and it seems to have almost no support.
What is being thrown around I tend to not think of as Image formats for an end user, Like HTML5 Dynamic Canvas objects, or creative use of CSS, or combining SVG vectored Graphics with SML scripting...
Some sites are switching to and touting WebM as a replacement to Animated GIF and Flash, but I consider this more of a Video Format along the lines of WMV. Other Sites are recomending WebP. All I really know about either of these other than surface details is both are developed by Google which for me is good enough to avoid them. I do not know how practical either is for a given purpose or where to get tools to compress or create them, or any of that - but you might look into WebP.

 

[JOdel]

I think there's still QuickTime...

 

[KageRyu]

Here's handy notes for WebP for those looking for animated image formats.
I have never liked Quicktime myself - for far too many reasons to count. I always dreaded coming across Quicktime, or being sent footage in Quicktime by a client.

 

[Miss B]

I think there's still QuickTime...

I believe it's only available for Mac these days, because Apple announced back in 2016 that the Windows version is dead. They gave up patching the Windows version, so it became obsolete.

I believe Ken's on a PC but, of course, I could be wrong.

 

[Ken1171]

Thanks for the heads up, KR! WebP sounds promising. I will definitely check it out. They list all the browsers that support it, but my question would be what SITES support it. Can we upload a WebP animated image here?

 

[Miss B]

Here's handy notes for WebP for those looking for animated image formats.

Now that's a format I've never heard of before. Thanks for the link Kage.

 

[Ken1171]

Looks like WebP is a Google file format. I remember GIF was originally released free for all, but at some point someone acquired the rights and tried to charge royalties for using it, which generated a backslash from the community that resulted into a general GIF boycott until the fees were dropped. To avoid money traps like that, Google has released WebP free and open-source, so nobody can charge for it later on.

I have checked my paint program (Paintshop), and it does support exporting to WebP, though the compression options are grayed out and unavailable. That kind of concerns me, for it won't let me control compression levels, or even alpha channel. There is only this fixed export preset that cannot be changed. I have checked this in Photoshop 2007 (I refuse to update), and there is no WebP support at all.

 

[Ken1171]

Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia that doesn't shed a very good light on Google WebP.

In September 2010, Fiona Glaser, a developer of the x264 encoder, wrote a very early critique of WebP.[19] Comparing different encodings (JPEG, x264, and WebP) of a reference image, she stated that the quality of the WebP-encoded result was the worst of the three, mostly because of blurriness on the image. Her main remark was that "libvpx, a much more powerful encoder than ffmpeg's jpeg encoder, loses because it tries too hard to optimize for PSNR" (peak signal-to-noise ratio), arguing instead that "good psycho-visual optimizations are more important than anything else for compression."[19]

In October 2013, Josh Aas from Mozilla Research published a comprehensive study of current lossy encoding techniques[58] and was not able to conclude WebP outperformed JPEG by any significant margin.[59]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP#cite_note-59

 

[Ken1171]

Another excerpt from Wikipedia, referring to a comparison between WebP animation with existing formats like GIF and APNG, also no looking promising when it comes to file size. It claims WebP animations are actually larger than APNG, which are larger than GIF animations. O___O

In a comparison made between GIF, APNG and WebP, it was shown, however, that APNG kept lower file size while keeping at least equal quality.[17]

 

[Ken1171]

I have done some research on WebP animations, but didn't find any good programs to create them. I ended up writing my own program to create WebP animation files, and the file size has dropped from 1.1MB GIF to 480KB WebP, which is less than half, but with 32-bits colors instead of 8-bits from GIFs. Much better image quality at half the size.

However, when I tried to upload it here, I've got an error claiming WebP is not allowed in this site. It's supported in the browser, but not in the site. I could even see the animation playing, but was not allowed to keep it. Bummer.

I have asked Lisa if it's possible to add WebP to the list of allowed file extensions at HW.