All of the animations in this website are
animated GIF images. These are effectively a series of still images that get swapped out programmatically by the browser (or other viewing program).
If the figures on this website show no motion for you, then you probably have the animation ability of your browser turned off. In that case, go to the advanced settings section of you browser and look for a checkbox that turns on animations.
The illusion of motion of the dashed lines are simply done by having each successive image have the dashes advance a bit until a dash falls on top of the next dash from the original image.
I chose using 6 snap-shot frames to advance a dash to the next position. It may be possible to get away with fewer snap-shots. Too few, though, and it will run the risk of looking jerky and there might be the possibility of seeing a reverse motion illusion. Too many and you needlessly make things harder than necessary and file sizes increase.
The snap-shots frames where drawn with
Inkscape, an open source vector graphics editor. Inkscape has a feature where the dashes of a line (or curve) can easily be advanced. Each drawing was saved as a PNG file and imported as a layer into
Gimp, the GNU image manipulation program, which can easily make animated gif images out of image layers.
There are a couple of animated images on the website not involving dashed lines, but these were made in the same way of importing layers into Gimp.
Its a little tedious, but if you are so inclined, the results can be satisfying.
Created on 05/09/2009 12:16 PM by jprideaux
Updated on 05/09/2009 01:07 PM by jprideaux
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