Austro-Hungarian Empire
Hurrah, my first commission!
My mother in law is giving a speech in Vienna to the Market research industry and as part of her power point presentation she wanted a graphic map showing how much of modern Europe the Austo-Hungarian empire bordered before they made the slight misjudgement of going to war with Britain, the Commonwealth, and France in 1914. (Well OK, the US turned up late, but they got there in the end and made the difference!).
So here is the before and after of their borders.
All done in Serif Drawplus 8. The process was pretty easy. Got a modern political map of Europe off the web and traced the borders. The cartouches were nicked from Wikipedia.
After doing this job, my love affair with vector drawing programmes for maps over raster ones is complete. It's just so easy to change stuff you're not happy with.
I wanted to make a two second animated gif where the '1913' border morphed into the 'today' border, but in Serif that would have meant blending about 40 steps between the two borders and saving each as separate image. Does anyone know of an easier way to do it? Morphing software?
All C&Cs welcomed!
Ravs
Last edited by ravells; 09-09-2007 at 07:34 PM.
If you don't know how the border changed (each of the intermediate steps through the years) you might be best with just a fade from one to the other.
Otherwise morph the boundary from one to the other, but weird things can happen (see attached example. This was quickly sketched in inkscape with the animation done in GIMP)
-Rob A>
Those are very nice maps, and that morphing effect is pretty cool.
Ah Rob...how did you do that? In Serif it seems I have to actually position each 'shrink' as a separate frame - and life is too short for that. There was no gradual diminishing of the border in this case, it just what Austria was left with after the war. I'll check out psp (as a gimp similar) and will look to see whether it does the morph in one step.Originally Posted by RobA
Cheers
Ravs
p.s. thanks jaerdaph!
rats..psp requires animationshop to do animations. Time to look into gimp...
(sigh, yet mores software to learn)
Ravs
I did the interpolate in Inkscape then exported the images as individual frames and stacked them up in GIMP.
With GIMP, the easiest way to make animated GIFs is just saving a layered image as a gif. It gives you the option to export it as an animation with each layer a frame. More power comes with GAP (GIMP Animation Package), however, probably similar to animationshop in PSP...
-Rob A>
Ah, so you had to make individual frames as well. How many did you use? I tried 40 for a 2 second animation (working on the principle that we 'see' at 24 images per second), but when I interpolated (which I assume is the same as a blend) 40 images, the computer got awfully slow. I suppose it would only take about 10 mins to copy and paste them into individual frames, but I was kinda hoping for a lazier way
Cheers
Ravs
If you really want to play with animation (and are willing to learn a new piece of software) try http://www.synfig.com/ which is free, available for multiple O/S and will do the "tweening" (morphing) you want in this case.
I was using it to generate video clip titles a while back, and found it fairly easy to use...
-Rob A>
Oh, And I think I used 20 frames between the two end ones, for a total of 22.
Last edited by RobA; 09-11-2007 at 11:00 AM. Reason: addendum
Let me know how it goes - I might have to dust that one off again (as if I have the time.... HAH!)
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