Are you developing games? Making awesome gifs of things and whatever else? Bitmapflow is a very clever application that will generate extra parts of animations to make them smoother. Like a lot of things lately, it slipped through the TODO list and got buried under a pile of "I should really take a look at these" but we're finally getting to it.
Now and then we like to highlight things that aren't games that we think might be useful to certain readers and game developers, this is one such time because it's just so seriously cool. Bitmapflow "uses optical flow to try to guess how the pixels move between frames, and blends them accordingly", like the example they give below:
It's mighty impressive, and after the initial release went out a Linux version was put up back in April.
Know what else is awesome about it? They application is made with Godot Engine, and it's even open source under the MIT license! Check out their video below:
Direct Link
Want to give it a run? Find it on itch.io and GitHub.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
EDIT: Though, to be fair, they do acknowledge that "[t]he results are far from perfect, and probably require some editing by hand". Okay, I should have read that beforehand; I assumed it was advertised as a ready-made automatic solution.
Last edited by DrMcCoy on 29 May 2021 at 8:40 pm UTC
...this looks terrible :(Depends on your perspective, personally I thought it looked pretty darn good for an automatic thing. It all depends how much of a perfectionist you're going to be on it. While in-game, many probably won't even notice some of the smaller issues it has, especially considering you're going to be seeing them against world backgrounds and often at a much faster pace than the examples.
As the developer says on the video, you'd use this to produce the frames and then tweak them to perfection in your preferred animation tool. It sure seems like it could save you a bunch of time. Though I'd assume it would be even handier if this was integrated into an open source pixel animation tool....this looks terrible :(Depends on your perspective, personally I thought it looked pretty darn good for an automatic thing. It all depends how much of a perfectionist you're going to be on it. While in-game, many probably won't even notice some of the smaller issues it has, especially considering you're going to be seeing them against world backgrounds and often at a much faster pace than the examples.
As the developer says on the video, you'd use this to produce the frames and then tweak them to perfection in your preferred animation tool. It sure seems like it could save you a bunch of time. Though I'd assume it would be even handier if this was integrated into an open source pixel animation tool.Yeah exactly, taking it literally as it outputs might look odd, the idea is to help save time. Even though the automatic bit does still look pretty good!
Though I'd assume it would be even handier if this was integrated into an open source pixel animation tool.It's made in Godot so if you're developing games in that FOSS Game Development Suite/Engine it's perfectly convenient... and even if you aren't there is at least one pixel-art editing software (Pixelorama) that's also made with Godot so it is likely to be able to use the output conveniently:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/need-to-make-some-pixel-art-pixelorama-is-a-cross-platform-foss-tool-worth-looking-at.15610
Not as convenient as not having to export images to an external application and back again. It's a bunch of extra steps and breaks the workflow.Though I'd assume it would be even handier if this was integrated into an open source pixel animation tool.It's made in Godot so if you're developing games in that FOSS Game Development Suite/Engine it's perfectly convenient...
This does not mean the tool isn't great, and the code is available under a permissive license for whoever wants to integrate it into their own software, open source or not. I guess even a command line tool and/or a general purpose library would be useful for developers.
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