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in 7 easy steps!
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Step 1-- Go to MediaBuilder 3D Text and make an animated banner. You can use your name or nic or whatever. I just use letters that look good together, ones I think will give a nice effect, like these:
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For banner size, I left it on the default, size not constrained setting. I used "Atlantis" font (in the "serif" dropdown), font size "8", effect "slide right", speed "slow", depth "1", frames "10", and run "forever" (for continous animation-- sort of like "loop 0" at imagemagick). Experiment with any and all of those once you get the hang of the technique, as all will make different kaleidoscopes. Of the effects, "slide right" and "slide left" will make a "true" kaleidoscoping motion, as in the above example, but all of the animations can be used for creating various effects with this basic technique.
Important Note!
The more frames you use, the higher your byte size will be. Unless I'm making something "special", I keep the frames around 8 to 10 (tho' I have been known to go as high as 20-- BIG bytes there!)
Step 2-- Once you have the banner you want, use the handy-dandy uplink to take your gif directly to gifworks (it's the first link just beneath the finished image, where it says, "click here to take your image to gifwoks"). ((alternatively, you can simply make your banner at gifworks by clicking on "New 3d Text" in the "file" dropdown. the set up is different but it's the same thing as mediabuilder)).
At gifworks, take note of the height of your image (mine was 34). and, from the "effects" dropdown, choose "clone". On the clone page, choose a number slightly less than the height of the image (I used 30). you'll get back an image that looks something like this:
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Step 3-- From the "edit" dropdown, choose "flip horizontal". Now your image looks like this:
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Step 4-- Clone again, at double the first cloning number (I used 60), to get this:
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Step 5-- Now we want to crop a square-ish piece of this, right out of the middle. To do that: from the "edit" dropdown, choose "crop". At gifworks, cropping is done in 2 stages. Click on the image and align the tip of the cursor arrow with where you want the upper-left corner of the cropped image to be and click on that spot. When the page reloads, click on the image and align the arrow with where you want the lower-right corner to be and click on that spot. Now your image looks a little like this:
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This is 149x124, but I want a perfectly square kaleidoscope, so:
Step 6-- From the "edit" dropdown, choose "resize". On the resize page, un-check the "constrain proportions" box, erase the numbers in the width and height boxes and type in your numbers (I chose 130 & 130).
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Now you have a square and are ready for the final step:
Step 7-- From the "effects" dropdown, choose "kaleidoscope" and on the k-scope page, choose "8" facets. Now you have a genuine, self-made kaleidoscope, looking something like this:
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Tips and Tidbits
the motion of the banner will determine which direction your finished k-scope unfolds. If the text is moving to the left, you get an outward k-scope like the above. But, if I had flipped it horizontally again before kaleidoscoping, I would have gotten this end product:
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Flipping vertically would also yield a different k-scope because-- Important Note-- Only the upper-left quarter of the image is used in kaleidoscope! Whether animated or non-animated, it doesn't matter what's in the rest of the image.
Imagine crosshairs dividing your image, from top to bottom and from left to right. The only part of the image used in k-scoping is what's in that upper-left quarter of the crosshairs.
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I put the x's in the portions of the image that won't be used so that you can see that, once you kaleidoscope it, the x's vanish, (the crosshairs remain because they were part of that upper-left quarter):
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For kicks, try some of the other effects on your k-scope. Want a pretty butterfly?
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Use "hourglass" (under "effects"), and then "rotate right" (under "edit")
How about a box?
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Resize to 100x100 and use "cube" (under "effects"), then use "smart crop" (under "edit"), to trim off the excess bg.
Rather have a ball?
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Use "sphere" (under "effects"), and "smart crop" (under "edit")
Try different combinations of the above (cube first then hourglass, or use sphere on your butterfly, etc). You could even clone it again, before and/or after using the other effects. The only real limits are imagination and byte size! Which, by the way, those last 3 effects will add, in spades, because the color gets stretched. So, instead of 3 colors, you suddenly have 256 and 40kb or more. Get around this by reducing size and colors. My examples were reduced to 90x90 and around 65 colors, final bytes around 14 to 17kb. I added height and width attributes of 130x130 to the image codes to restore them to "full size".
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So, now you know how to make a square kaleidoscope, and butterflies and boxes and stuff. Wanna learn how to make kaleidoscoping lines and bars? Click on next..
NEXT
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NEW! Want multiple colors in your 'scope? Try this nifty tute by Barb From Maine!
susan © 2001