Tuesday, 04-Mar-14 23:41:00 CET

Animation of an illusionistic letter J warping into other shapes and back

This is the animation of an illusionistic figure, the letter J. Actually I tried to make it so that it looked like the aquarelle J that I made on September 10th 1998. This animation of J is warped into other shapes and then back again. Over and over again, infinitly.

The Synfig studio program turns math into art. It is indeed a very complex program but when you wrapped you brain around it you can create unreal illusions. Shapes are defined by splines and between frames the splines are warped automatically, or if necessary, adjusted to the liking of the animation artist.

I postprocessed the frames in Gimp to create the final animated GIF. I optimized the frames for GIF animation so that only necessary bits were used. I figured out that the Floyd-Steinberg dithering with reduced color bleeding and a maximum palette of 256 colors would give the most pleasing look. The result became 821 Kb.