Animated gif encoding within grasshopper

gifmaker.gh

Despite the age of the format, gifs remain a popular and very widely supported way to share small animations. The slider animation function in Grasshopper makes it easy to turn definitions into a sequence of images, but until now you still needed some additional software to actually turn them into playable animations. I used to use VirtualDub for this, but felt it would be nice to be able to do this quicker and without leaving Grasshopper.

The attached component lets you simply specify the filepath of the first frame in a sequence, choose a framerate, then it automatically finds the consecutive images and compiles them into an animated gif.

...and since I'd hate for this to lead to a flood of oversized files - remember, one of the things that makes animated gifs so nice is that they can load and play quickly almost anywhere, but this advantage is lost if the files are too large. When creating your slider animation frames, choose a small resolution, and don't make too many frames. 50 frames at 400x300 pixels is often plenty. If you do want to make something epic and hi-res, stick to a proper modern compressed video format.

Enjoy!