I am a great believer in using the basic Gimp tools wherever possible, some easy to use 'effects' scripts quickly produce a result, but getting the same 'result' as everyone else, is not very creative.

However, sometimes scripts and plugins are a boost to productivity, especially when it comes to animations and the many-many layers that are involved. If you are really into animation then go for the old Gimp Animation Plugin/Package GAP. 

I do not really want that monster cluttering up my installation just for the very occasional animation project, so here are some scripts and plugins used in the demo video that might come in useful.

This one follow-path.py might only be needed once-in-a-while but it does save a lot of manual work. There are others that do similar.

http://www.arakne.es/en/2014/04/ 
http://www.arakne.es/wp-content/uploads/...-path5.zip

Saul Goodes page.
http://chiselapp.com/user/saulgoode/repo...pt-fu/home 

Worth bookmarking, lots of useful scripts including one to manage layer-groups. You can do it by hand but for more that a few layers, it becomes very tedious.
http://chiselapp.com/user/saulgoode/repo...roup-layer

Ofnuts plugins. 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-too...s/scripts/

If you need to merge two animations or add text then interleave-layers-0.4.py is very straight forward. 
Duplicating layers, various ways by hand but ofn-reorder-copy-layers.py speeds the process up.

Finally a little tool, does not do very much, I use it mainly for dumping layers to single png's with sensible numbered names. Nice simple plugin for renaming layers, anitools.py http://registry.gimp.org/node/25029

All of those in action.

Good day! I am new to this community and would like to ask something.

I am making an image which contains a glowing symbol in the middle. The black parts are seen as transparent for the engine I am going to load it. That's why I want the values from the black areas to remain at zero after switching from RGB to indexed ( 256 ) mode. Instead black becomes a dark green color.

However when I try this with a plain black image it remains black, so my guess is that the whole picture is affected by the glowing thing I made in the middle. How can I prevent this from happening? I am using GIMP 2.8.16 if that matters.

I just installed Gimp and the program opens in three separate disconnected pieces, the main screen and two palettes, toolbox and brushes.  I will attach a screenshot.  I can't dock the palettes onto the main program.

How do I connect it?

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I was thinking about Seano's post where he is making an animation of the moon rotating around the earth. Lots and lots of layers for Gimp.

Art Of Illusion is a well established java application for ray-tracing/3D rendering and can output all the frames required for an animation. 

   

Too many / too large for a gif so here is a couple of orbits in a video.

Hello forum, this week I am attempting to build an animated logo for my website, which will be a combination of two animated .GIFs when it is completed, (I am working with .XCF format for all the editing). 

As a quick explanation, my website name is comprised of two words, both beginning with the letter 'O', and so I want to make one 'O' spin in a left-to-right direction to represent planet Earth as observed from the common Northern Hemisphere perspective, and the other 'o' half the size, to orbit around the Big 'O', also in a left-to-right direction, to represent the Moon.

Because the Big 'O' will make a complete revolution of 24 layers in 2.0689 seconds, there will need to be 696 layers for the little 'o' to complete one revolution in one minute.  This equates to 24 hours in a day and 29 days in a lunar month (29x24=696).  It will be a huge image file at 1024x512 as .XCF, but I will cut it down to 128x64 for the interlaced .GIF logo on the website.

I am using the 'Spinning-Globe' Script-Fu plugin to create my revolving letter 'O' from a flat base image, and then building both my spinning Big 'O' and little 'o' after rotating the angles of 'spin' for each to their authentic angles, and I have come across two problems which I have tried all day to find a solution for, searching and reading for the last ten hours with no luck, which is surprising.  Hence, as it is now 5pm in Perth, Australia, I have joined the forum to ask for some help.

Here are my two problems:

1. I need to increase my Big 'O' animation from 24 layers to 696, to cause it to rotate 29 revolutions within the centre of the whole animation, however although the layers 'replace' properly when played back over 24 layers, when I use the Files -> Open as Layers to append my 24 layered .XCF animation with a copy of itself, and then playback, it replaces the first half of the two revolutions with the transparent background, as expected, but then the second revolution from the Open as Layers addition does not 'replace' the last layer image with the new layer with different transparency.

How can I Open as Layers (or something else to append an .XCF file with more layers), and maintain the 'replace' attribute so that the previous layer is erased by the new layer, including transparent pixels?

2. As the Spinning-Globe plugin does not allow more than 360 layers, so I have used 348 to create the orbit of the little 'o'. I need to double each layer in a large number, so that layers 1,2,3,... and 1,2,3,... become layers 1,1,2,2,3,3,... and hope that there is some singular method to somehow Open as Layers a copy of my 348 layer image and make each layer fall into place behind its twin from the first.

How can I Open as Layers a copy of my image and append the added image's layers to the current image's with a layer-by-layer sequence, rather than adding all the layers of the new image to the end of the current image?

The first question is the most important, and probably the easiest one to answer, I suspect, although it has certainly not for me all day today.  The second question is one I could probably get around, but it will mean editing 696 frames by hand, and that will take a long long time, so I would be eternally grateful if anyone might know some answer off the top of their head from past experience, of which I have plenty of with GIMP for resizing .JPGs and very little with creating large complex animations.

Thank you for reading this long request for help.  I will check back over the next few days to see if anyone might have any answers to either problem.

Pat David has written a nice article about the GIMP community:

https://patdavid.net/2017/03/community/

I tried doing the "save tool options now" thing but it doesn't work. If I highlight the text and type over it, all the formatting goes to default.

Plus I'd like to not have to change it every single time I need to create a new text box!

Any idea what the problem is? I'm using MacBook Pro btw.