Many years ago I had a successful website that hosted many hundreds of small 3D animated gifs that I had created, but as broadband speeds got faster the demand for low resolution animations faded. It did not help matters that a giant website called Giphy appeared on the scene and made my old website redundant even though many of my animations could be found there.

 

I decided to close the old website down, it had been constructed as a desktop version only, so I started to display large better quality animated gifs on Google+ but after many years of displaying my work there G+ also went down the pan . I have now built this small website with Wix to showcase some of my best work from over twenty years by reworking some of the source files.

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The fun part for many of you is to actually modify one of my animations, there is no reason why you cannot re-size or add text to any of my animations and if the gif has a transparent background, most of them have, it is even possible to plant it on top of another image or animation by using one of the many online” image editing” websites. I have made a few blank animated gif templates; just click the blank template option from the animations menu.

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Most of my animated gifs have been built using a CAD 3D modeler, rendered in several frames and then animated. Download any animation to your hard drive, they are all free and with no copyright issues.

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How these animations are made
 

I use Silverscreen to make my 3D models and it is possible to place a photograph of the model you want to make onto a solid rectangle and the trace around it to get the basic shape. This outline is the basis for constructing the 3d model and it has to be built using several sections or "blocks". There are many different commands and procedures for creating these sections but I will not bore you with the details

The good thing about making small animations is the fact that I do not spend hours putting in exact details and a few stray solid objects here or there does not really matter once the image has been reduced to the size of the animation required. The model can be viewed from any angle and is a true 3D image so it can be used in a variety of animations. Once the hard work of building the model is over the fun begins. I can make hundreds of different animations from one model and in many cases combining several models into one animation.

 

Silverscreen has a built in texture renderer but I prefer to import the model into Artlantis and apply textures and colours to my models. This is comparatively easy if you colour code each object that you want rendered with the same texture. Finally the  JPEGS produced by Artlantis are opened in Jasc animation shop put together as an animation, transparent backgrounds created , adjusted to a suitable image size, optimised and cropped to size. It all sounds easy, and it really is once you know how each separate piece of software works, and that sadly does take a little time and a lot of experimentation but once I have made an animation the sense of satisfaction that I have made something that other people will want to use is what keeps me going on.
 

If you do use any of my work on your website or blog you can make me very happy if this website gets a link and attribution