Step 1 | Unzip the "rotated-golds" file and put gold-0.bmp, gold-23.bmp, gold-45.bmp and gold-68.bmp into the "environments and textures" folder associated with Blade Pro. |
Step 2 | Open a new file. The one I used was 100 x 100 pixels. Create the layers you are going to need |
Step 3 | Flood fill the "Fill" layer with the pattern you want your animation to appear against. (Or a solid color closely matching the main color of the pattern which you will set to transparent for the GIF animation.) |
Step 4 | Move to the next layer up (Frame 1). Drop some text, (or a simple graphic) on the background. I chose "Q" from Fleurons with floating and anti-alias checked. Save this selection to the alpha channel. Duplicate this layer for as many total frames you want to assemble the animation.. |
Step 5 | Go back to Frame 1. Apply Blade Pro to the selection. Use the "gold, basic" preset, but click on the environment button and choose gold-0.bmp. Save the result as the first frame of your animation. Turn off visibility for this layer. |
Step 6 | Move to the next layer up. If you need to, reload the selection from the alpha channel. Repeat Step 5, but this time use gold-23.bmp as the environment bitmap for the "gold, basic" preset. |
Step 7 | Repeat the above step, moving up a layer each time. Use gold-45.bmp and gold-68.bmp for the environment bitmap, in turn. |
Step 8 | Again, repeat the above step, but now use gold-0.bmp for the environment and rotate it by 90 degrees. (Click the curved arrow.) |
Step 9 | Repeat Steps 6 and 7 but rotate the appropriate environment bitmap by 90 degrees each time. |
Step 10 | Assemble these frames into an animation. |
Note 1 | For the animation above, I actually started at 68 degrees and went to 180 degrees (gold-0 with two clicks of the rotate arrow in Blade Pro). Then I swung it back to 68 degrees. I put 20 seconds in between frames, but the first frame and the middle frame I increased to 30 seconds so that there was a bit of a dwell at the ends of the swing. |
Note 2 | If you thought ahead at Step 5, you realized that you would use this gold-0.bmp again and did the rotations at this point. Ditto for a few others. |