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How do all of you make a gif knit with the winter bash knitting website?

I saw a couple of gifs from this question here

And I thought maybe I could make mine into one. But I'm not too sure how?

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    Series of still images, then online gif maker like this. :) Commented Dec 23, 2018 at 15:39

3 Answers 3

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If you want to make your own knitted gif without taking an existing .gif as an example, you can knit each frame by hand, then assemble them using an online gif maker.

If you want to turn an existing .gif into a knitted gif:

You take the gif apart into several frames. This answer mentions the criteria those frames need to meet to allow uploading into the knitting tool:

It turns out that you can upload any picture as long as it is a given size: 442 pixels high by 1190 pixels wide. The knitting tool will do all of the resampling and color quantizing for you.

Then, it's as Rob says in the comments to their posts:

upload frame by frame and reassemble the downloaded frames into a standard .GIF using EzGif online editor (on my phone's puny screen).

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  1. Choose a subject image that either has the knitting machine's palette or uses 12 or more colors that you can map to the machine's palette, if patches of color are not adjacent then you can reuse colors without losing details, otherwise you should be prepared to lose details.

    Winter Bash 2018 Knitting Machine Palette

  2. You can use blurring or outlining to thicken thin lines, areas must be over 8 pixels wide or they are almost certain to disappear. Sliding the image (if you are doing an animation) helps to catch fine details.

  3. Once you decide on your image and do some preliminary tweaking (and possibly color remapping) resize your image using that difficult to use tool or an easy one, like EzGIF, to 136x55 (seriously) pixels. Remember that the stitches are large and a single color (chosen from the machine's palette) here's a closeup:

    Close-up of the Stitching

  4. Examine your 136x55 pixel image, if it's good then you are good to go. Likely you will need to tweak the image considerably to make it suitable for uploading. Remember: It's not how horrible (or wonderful) it looks when you upload it - it's all about how great it looks when you download it.

  5. If you are doing an animation try using EzGIF (or other tools) to drop as many frames as possible while maintaining a good cadence, uploading and downloading over 50 frames is both cumbersome and error prone; as is trying to figure out which one you skipped.

  6. After you finish tweaking and remapping resize your image before uploading to 1190x442 (since other sizes are not accepted). There's no point editing the full size image, it's a waste of effort and you won't be able to guess the result.

Note: It's been mentioned in Chat and the Winter Bash 2018 Knitting Q&A a few times that people didn't realize that you could upload and download arbitrary images, these are the controls to use:

Upload and Download Controls

Practice and patience, along with numerous failures along the way, are what will be required for a reasonable download. It's not easy once you advance beyond a few colors and frames. Using multiple online tools, with dozens of tabs open, on a mobile phone makes for a real challenge.

Don't pixel peep, stand back a couple of feet (one meter) to fully appreciate the art.

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To add to @Tinkeringbell's answer:

  • To resize your gif to 442x1190, use this. It really helped me.

  • Then use the splitter tool. It automatically uploads a .ZIP file to your computer, so you don't have to do it all by yourself.

  • Upload every image to our knitting tool and save it. Unfortunately, we don't have anything to speed up the process, so that is the part where you'll have to work for a while.
  • Use this to gather all your images to .gif. Note: You can upload the whole bunch of images.
  • Post an answer and enjoy new reputation!

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