YAY YIPPEE <33 thank you for asking i’ve been hoping someone would (lol)
so my new specialest little guy is Josyphine Rockwell (she/he) and he’s part of a d&d play-by-post campaign that one of my friends is running! the premise of the thing is that there’s a mining town that overthrew the evil family subjugating them 6 years ago, but in the process 12 miners were killed by an Evil Necromancer (part of the family) who ended up escaping. and now… the necromancer is returning for her revenge.
one of these people killed was Jo’s older brother, Joseph. since that time, she’s been training in secret to be able to defeat the Necromancer and avenge him. mechanically, she’s a variant human fighter (just… an Average Jo) with the mage slayer feat! now that the plot is out of the way i can explain why i love her so bad… (infodump style) (under the cut bc it got very long)
he’s got curse of being 21 in the town he grew up in. he’s a 3rd generation miner and his grandparents were part of the first group of workers who moved to the town. all his aunties, uncles, and cousins are continuously in his business (and i’ve given the DM permission to make as many of them NPCs as she finds funny). she’s trying to be a cool aloof stud with the full name Josyphine Annabel. she absolutely does have admirers but is too busy revenge questing to realize that half the eligible bachelorettes in town want her. she’s a little hater and a menace. he still calls his mom Mama and fusses over her safety but desperately wants to move out. he has a southern accent so thick i sometimes have to take a second to think about how to transliterate what he said. i’ve drawn him a whole family tree complete with Lore.
And Also: he is just a guy who loves his brother. He has a scrap of Joseph’s favorite vest that he carries with him everywhere. He used to be Josy and Joseph was Joe, but now she’s Jo for the both of them. they used to be blue and yellow, but now it’s just her, in blue-green. everyone says she used to be such a sweet girl, and it’s true, but now her temper is short and she never smiles. she KNOWS it’s not what he would want for her, but he’s not here to tell her, is he? maybe once the necromancer is dead and gone, she’ll be able to rest. but not until then. not until then.
she makes me sick!! i’m so ill!! i have been thinking so hard abt her that i get physically nauseous 💀 autism is wild actually. here’s what she looks like
[ID: two picrews and one drawing of a dark-skinned Black young adult from the shoulders up. He has stubble and shoulder length cornrows. in all three pictures, his expression is grumpy.]
anyone can ask me follow up questions btw. bats my eyelashes cutestyle
Tumblr started turning gifs into webp when you try to save them, so here’s the link for the walking DD heroes from my previous post, in case you want them!
Put them under your email signature, it will sure look professional :)
I’ve got the idea to make those gifs after seeing this post, it just looked so cute! Little guys walking across your screen! What if I did the same with the gifs I ripped from Darkest Dungeon? My mind was set, I just needed to make a gif slide to the right, how hard could that be?
(…A lengthy backstage process after the read more...)
If you have an easy solution that could have ended my headache much sooner, please let me know, I'd love to learn. But yeah, it didn’t take long before I noticed I had no clue how to achieve my goal. The problem consisted in how to deal with two simultaneous but different types of movement in one gif (the walking animation + the sliding to the right animation), all while preserving the quality and transparency.
First thing that came into mind was manually moving each frame of the walking gifs a little to the right but it would take SO much time and it would be SO boring I refused to even consider it again. Even with automate actions it would take so fucking long, there have got to be a better way, I mean, it was literally just sliding a gif to the right.
I’ve tried searching for sites that could let me do it to no avail. I did find GIPHY’s gif editor though, it allowed me to edit the gifs in very pleasing ways, totally not vomit inducing (albeit not transparent, it lost some points on that front).
I’ve considered some screen capture gimmicks with an open source software called ScreenToGif but I already knew from experience that the background removal function leaves behind ugly artifacts in the borders of the gifs, same thing with OBS.
I’ve tried looking up in DragonBones, the very own software I’ve used to export the game assets, but I could not figure out a way to make the whole thing move together all while having the regular animation play on loop, if that makes sense? But then again, I didn’t look much into it because I’ve finally had an idea that would work!
I could use a video editing software to make it all happen! I even had a very good open source software installed already, kdenlive! There was an initial problem where I could not figure out how to preserve the transparency, kdenlive would always render the gifs with black backgrounds. But after some googling I’ve found out you could render a video with alpha, so all I would have to do in the end was to convert the video back into a gif!!
First, I’ve rendered a video consisting of 10 sequences in a row of the walking hero gif, so the loop was long enough so they could walk all the way across the borders of the video (the original gif only lasted 1 second). I’ve done that 18 times, one for each hero– NOT counting all the times I had to try and try again for some, ignore the rest of the paragraph, it’s all technical problems. Some kept turning out with white borders around the heroes for some unknown reason (anti, sb, crusader and arb). The problem went away after I used the original untrimmed gif for each of them but THEN I had to redo crusader’s gif from the DragonBones project up because there was too much empty space around his gif in particular and then it would look small in the end if I hadn’t redone it. Reynauld, always the problem boy.
Then I had to find out how to change kdenlive’s project resolution to fit each final gif dimensions. I guess I didn’t quite figured out how to change it in the end, but I did notice whenever you bring an image that’s not quite the size of the default project, the software would ask if you wanted to switch to that resolution. So I took note of each of their heights and then saved white rectangles measuring 2000px width x their respective heights. All I had to do now was drop the right rectangle into the project before editing said hero and we’re set!
I’ve chosen 2000px as width resolution because then the gifs would look very tiny when sized down in Tumblr’s dashboard! But afterwards I realized that choice meant I could not optimally use my convertor of choice (EZGIF.com, a free and excellent gif editing site) to turn the videos back into gifs, because there was a limit on the resolutions, the gifs with height higher than 300 would turn out all deformed, and the other option would make the quality way too shitty. Luckily by the end I found out Photoshop had an option to import videos as animation frames, and all I had to do was save them as gif directly from PS, with no resolution constraints!
Anyways, let’s wrap this up because I’m getting incredible tired just from recalling and typing it up everything that I’ve done yesterday. I’ve literally spent the entire day on this silly project.
After I had the alpha movs of their looping walk cycles, all I had to do was to drop the respective rectangle into the project (to change the project's resolution to match it to the hero’s height) and then drag the mov to the timeline and apply a transformation effect with two key frames: one at the start of the clip moving the clip so it starts from out of the left border of the screen, and the other key frame by the end of the clip, with the clip ending outside the right border. Doing it so would make the whole clip slide across the screen, appearing on the left and disappearing on the right!
I also had to figure out how to make it start with them already on the screen instead of the gif starting on an empty screen, but cutting the video would interfere with the transformation effects, so I had to render it first and edit it again later (I cut a little bit of the beginning of the video and pasted it back on the end). Luckily rendering those tiny gifs only took like 3 seconds each, because I basically had to do it thrice for each gifs.
After turning them all back into gifs in PS it was done!! I saved two versions, one original sized and one 50% smaller, just because I know there are people out there with internet connections that could not handle loading a gifset of 10 gifs at around 4MB each.
And that was it, I’ve learned a lot, I’m never doing anything like this again :)) thanks for reading it all if you did, I'm so so tired
