Old question regarding black areas on GIFs...

Elias_The_Crimson · Post by **Elias_The_Crimson** » Mon May 04, 2009 5:58 am

When making animated GIF images for turrets, I seem to get random black/non-transparent areas on most or all frames on the animation. Black is supposed to be the transparent color, right? Well, it doesn't seem to work always:

I have no idea what's going on. I'm using MSPaint and GIMP to make the frames, and then GIMP's animation feature to save the GIFs.
I cannot relate the presence of these opaque areas to any specific editing actions of mine. Sometimes the entire animation is affected, sometimes only a few frames have these spots. They may appear across the entire should-be transparent background, or just as a few strokes of black.

I'm stumped, please help me?

jwa8402 · Post by **jwa8402** » Mon May 04, 2009 6:10 am

I believe its at least one layer not being full black. I grabbed that gun when you posted it and noticed this. Mostly fixed it by going back over each layer with true black.

Elias_The_Crimson · Post by **Elias_The_Crimson** » Mon May 04, 2009 6:18 am

jwa8402 wrote:I believe its at least one layer not being full black. I grabbed that gun when you posted it and noticed this. Mostly fixed it by going back over each layer with true black.

You're indeed right, but what could possibly be causing it?
All I can think of is that I used non-opaque paint brushes to create better fading effects for the muzzle flashes (rather than editing the color of every pixel individually in MS Paint like I did with my first sprite)... You think this be prevented somehow?

(OFFTOPIC: You saved my sprite? Awesome! \o/ )

jwa8402 · Post by **jwa8402** » Mon May 04, 2009 6:44 am

Ya it looks awesome but I have to come up with a ship or at least a cannon mount worthy of it because it doesn't look right on anything I have. Now I've just gotta get it to shoot my tied-up-person bullet and we'll have a circus!

I can't say I'm any good at creating weapons but when I fix ones like this(because its not the only one with this problem) I use the magic wand tool to copy the weapon and it's flash into a pure black then fix the rest pixel by pixel.

That is just the first way I found that works, I'm sure experienced weapon-makers like Arcalane could tell you how to do it properly.

Elias_The_Crimson · Post by **Elias_The_Crimson** » Thu May 07, 2009 4:28 am

Hmm, I think I've gotten it figured out now

I could never figure out how that friggin' wand worked, so I picked up the Paint Bucket/Fill tool and found a wonderful option called "Fill Similar Color". One can use this to fill the entire background with pure black by setting the color difference threshold low enough so that it will not affect the near-black muzzle flash pixels, but high enough to convert all "black" into pure black!

Post by **Kaelis** » Thu May 07, 2009 5:40 am

don't use MSPaint for creating frames that are supposed to go into gifs. Well, you can use it, but make sure you fill the background in some other app, or paste the opaque areas onto one-color background. There is something wrong with MSPaint that makes stuff like this happen.