I’m experiencing a wee problem. I’m making a little gif of a Cheshire Cat type emoticon, where the body fades out but the smile remains, then the body fades in again, and so it loops. This is on just 2 layers - smile and body.
Over 14 frames I faded the body cel opacity down to zero, with a frame rate of 100ms, wait for 2000ms next frame, then fade back in over the next 14 frames at 100ms again then wait 3000ms on last frame.
But. When I export the gif, the body just blinks off and later back on again, there is no gradual fading.
So, I checked all my settings and all looks as it should. I have used this means of fading in the past with no probs.
I even tried putting each cel onto it’s own layer and changing the layer opacity over the 14 steps, but no luck.
I don’t understand what could possibly go wrong. I checked back through old files and I used this very approach back in March 2017 without a hitch.
I’m on Win10 64 and am using Aseprite 1.2.9 x64 in RGB Colour Mode but I also tried this out with the Beta with the same result.
The problem is that .gif files don’t support semi-transparency. It can only contain 0 and 255 alpha values (invisible and 100% visible).
You can add a background which would let it fade, but only into that color. Also there’s the added problem of gifs only supporting 256 colors. Which means that if you have 20 colors and you make them 20% transparent, now the program has to mix the background and foreground colors together to create new colors, so now you have 40 colors, and the same for each time you change to a new opacity. When you reach 256 colors it will start to check your colors and pick the closest out of the 256 we’ve already used and change the remaining ones to those.
Many thanks for your help KashouC. After checking and testing I can see that where I have used this in the past, it has only been with one colour and only where no other transparency is involved. In this case I was trying to fade a shaded emoticon on a transparent bg, so no wonder it didn’t work. I did get it to work however, if I fill in the bg, and only fade ONE other colour, it works. I hope one day gif file capability is improved so we can all get more creative.
Call this one solved and closed.