I new to Xara products and need a hand please.

[raynerj]

Hi Deb,

shhhhhhhhhhhhh... I took them from around my wifes neck. If you do not tell , I won't...

They where a 5 minute doodle in Xara X1. It took 5 minutes because I made them twice. The Pearls where too tiny on the other string. I copied the pearls from a drawing I did of my wife.

[temptingtaylor81@hotmail.com]

Ok guys I guess I should show you what I have done. Thanks to the help of all of you I can do some basic stuff on my own http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[temptingtaylor81@hotmail.com]

And this too!!
This is a good start and I am excited about working on more ideas for my website.
I am a novice at this so please take that into account http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

Thanks again.
Deb.

P.s John, you secret is safe with me http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[raynerj]

Looks Good Deb,

Watch the size of the animated Gifs. Those files can become totally huge in no time. The smaller the size of the graphics the happier your dialup customers will be.

Have you tried a rocking motion, instead of a complete revolve? A complete revolve could almost be as bad as a Blinking one.

[Egg Bramhill]

Way you go there Deb!
Great to see you getting to grips with Xara3D.
Egg

[temptingtaylor81@hotmail.com]

Thanks Egg, I am enjoying X3d it's a lot of fun.

JohnR, to keep my gif files from blowing up to a huge size do I just need to make them smaller? I have been having problems with some of my pictures becoming to big and I need to keep the background transparent.

Thanks,
Deb.

[raynerj]

The more frames you have in the animation the larger the gif. IF you have 30 frames per second and 2 seconds long, that is 60 frames. If each fframe is 5k then you have a 300k gif.

Use the minimum number of frames and keep the total animation to 1 cycle, and you can keep it manageable.

If you want small gifs, do not use the shadow feature! That is for huge files.

Use the same color background when you create the transparent gif. This will eliminate the jaggies you can sometimes see on gifs.

[Egg Bramhill]

Sorry John
But that's not correct. The time a frame displays has no bearing on the file size.

If you have 30 frames that display for one minute each, this is exactly the same file size as if you displayed 30 frames for one second each. The duration of a frame display time makes no difference to the file size.

Think of the animation as a photo gallery. Each photo has a file size. All the photo file sizes added together gives the overall file size. The length of display of each photo is just a code within the animation, so be it a second or an hour, it doesn't alter the file size. The only thing it MIGHT effect is the smoothness on INITIAL download.

The 'Frames per Cycle' determines how many seperate images there are in a single animation, which effects file size AND smoothness.

The 'Frames per Second' determine the smoothness of the animation, but has no effect on file size.

Deb: Other thing to consider in reducing file size is colour depth. Can make the animation look good but with less colours. It's suprising how you can reduce the colours but still have an effective animation.

On Johns point re Shadows I agree. The reason for this is that shadows, to be effective, need a good colour gradiant, and at 16 colours you just wont get a good gradient. Shadows also enlarge the overall animation image size and therefore also increase file size.

Egg

[raynerj]

Egg,

I stand corrected. I was thinking xara not X3D5. Thanks...