Photoshop: Animating a GIF

We went through the process of animating a rotating dice using Adobe Photoshop.

First, set up your canvas size. Ensure that it is set to pixels with a width of 1482px and a height of 356px. The resolution must be 72dpi.

This will successfully set up your canvas. After this, you’ll need to make guidelines to ensure that, when you’re drawing, the dice are in proportion to each other. An easy way to do this is by going to View in the control bar and selecting ‘new guide’ which will bring up a dialogue box. select vertical and input the value 20% for quick and simple measuring. You can then draw down the horizontal guides from the rulers and place them where you want. If the rulers aren’t on-screen go to View > Rulers to enable them.

You can enable the grid for more accurate drawing if you like by going to View > Show > Grid.

After this, create 5 separate layers for each drawing of the die to enable flexibility within your work for later. Make the background layer invisible so that when you’re working, it’s transparent.

Begin drawing your die ensuring that each one is on its own layer. To help me, I used a drawing of 5 die pre-made and traced over them roughly. It is best to use a hard brush so that filling in the shapes looks cleaner.

Fill in the die with colour using the paint bucket tool with the shortcut ‘G’ and add the dots using the brush tool, shortcut ‘B’.

Now that they are all drawn, put them into a group by selecting them all and pressing command + G for ease of access. Now the animating will begin.

Drag each die on top of each other so that they overlap – with the 5th die at the bottom and the 1st die at the top. For this to work, you need to make sure that your layers are the right way around as well.

 

Go to Window > Workspace > Motion to open the tools for creating an animation. Alternately, you can go to Workspace and select Timeline. The workspace will appear at the bottom of the screen and you’ll have the option to select to create either a video timeline or frame animation. I chose video timeline but you can switch between the two workflows if need be.

Make sure that all of the dice layers are not invisible so that you can work with them in the timeline. With each of the layers at the same duration, you’ll be unable to view it as an animation so, to create a progression, you can shorten the duration of each layer and place each them directly after one another to look like steps.

To loop the animation, shorten the work area with the translucent bars so that you can see how it looks as a GIF.

For all of the unnecessary space around the animation, select the crop tool or use the shortcut ‘C’ to reduce the size.

 

Once you’re happy with how it looks, export it by going to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy) and a dialogue box will show up. Ensure that the preset is set to ‘GIF 128 Dithered’ before saving it in your desired location.

Here is my GIF:

With my dice, I realised that where the single red dot is supposed to appear, three dots appears instead and so my animation is technically incorrect. I should ensure that, when working through tasks, remember to focus on the design aspect as much as on the technical process when I’m learning a new technique to ensure a rounded and good quality outcome.

For greater detail within my illustrations, I could’ve thought about a shadow on the bottom face or the angled face to add more dimension and complexity.

This is an improved version where I put the red dot in the right place throughout and added some shadow to the bottom face. An ideal version of this GIF would be perfectly aligned so that the position of the dice didn’t move so much.