Animation Guide: Flipping

Biscuit · #1 (**permalink**) 06-27-2009, 11:16 PM

It's been awhile since I've written a guide, so I thought I'd make a new one. Some people have been asking me how to do this effect and I thought I'd just post a guide about it so everybody can see how to do it.

Please note that I am using PhotoShop CS3 in this guide. You should be able to do this using any photo-editing software that allows animation though.

First, let me show you the result of this tutorial:

Pretty cool, huh? Well, let's get started!

Make/get any avatars that you want to flip back and forth. For a guide on how to make toon avatars, I suggest viewing Slate's guide:
How to make an avatar or edit picture in Photoshop

Here's the two images I'm using:

Ok, now that you have your avatars, make sure both of them are in one image on different layers.

Now, right click the layer of the first image and choose "Duplicate Layer" to make a copy of that image, name it whatever you want, you should now have 3 layers.

Now, make sure the layer you just made is selected, and make sure you have the Move Tool (V) is selected. Hold down the Alt key and drag the left side of the image toward the middle a little bit. Because you are holding the Alt key, the right side should follow the left side. After you are done, hit the Enter key to apply the transformation.
The top layer should be a little less wide than the one below so it looks like it's overlapping.

Your avatar should look similar to this:

Repeat the process of Duplicating the top layer, and Step 3, making it smaller and smaller each time until it can't get any thinner.

Your avatar should look something like this now:

Now do the same exact process on the second image that you are going to flip in the avatar, until it looks something like this:

Depending on how many times you needed to duplicate the layers, you could have anywhere from 4-7 layers for each image. Which makes 8-14 layers total.

Now that we have all of the materials needed, here comes the animating part of the tutorial. If you do not have your animation window open, in PhotoShop, go to Window >> Animation to have it show up.

For the first frame, have every layer invisible except for the full size of the first image, mine looks like this:

On each frame, make the next smallest picture visible. Make sure to make all of the other layers invisible each time. When you finish, you should have anywhere from 4-7 frames that look like this:

Now, continue on with the second image, except do it the opposite of the first image. Making each frame the bigger image until it's full size again:

As you can see, there's the fundamental flipping effect we are trying to make in this tutorial. Now we just need to get it to flip back to the first image.

To finish this off, just make the second image get smaller until it's a bar, and then make the first image get bigger and bigger until it's full size. This should make it loop around to the first frame of the animation and make it a nice fluid animation. And we are finished!

Saving:
Saving an animation in PhotoShop isn't the same as saving a still image. In order to save it so that it plays as an animation, you have to go to File >> Save for Web & Devices. Then a window should pop up, just ignore it and hit the save button on it and you're done! Make sure it's a GIF.

I hope this helps some of you. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them on here and I'll try to help.

cloy · #2 (**permalink**) 11-13-2009, 02:56 AM

I found this very helpful! I likez!

Raxz · #3 (**permalink**) 11-14-2009, 01:28 AM

Epic win. I didn't realize it was an optical illusion that just makes it LOOK like it's flipping. Although, I think in GIMP, but I haven't tested it yet, you can just duplicate the same layer about 15 times and use a Map To Plane filter on each of them, each time with a slightly different rotation.

Brb testing that now.... :P

EDIT: Yes it works, it makes it look kinda like you're rotating a piece of paper....