“Edupunks Animated Atlas 3D Animated GIF” animated GIF by aforgrave
Success! Oh Happy Day!! The flat original animated GIF layers, after being Grouped and Duplicated into the 3D Book template .psd, managed to hold their alignment as a group while the scale, rotate, and skew tranforms were applied.
After that, it was necessary to create 42 frames to re-make the animation (copying GIF layers to another file as a group keeps them together and in order as layers, but the frame animation information is lost) and then sequentially re-assign the GIF layers to the frames in order and then re-apply the frame intervals to restore the animation.
But it worked! Just as it should. No photoshop futzing required.
Hooray for the tool allowing the implementation of a vision in support of the refinement of a technical skill and acquisition of new learning all while some Art is being made.
Freaking Amazing– it was one thing to do the whole rotation to make the book look real, but the animation brings it to life, like not other book, except on about ds106, could do.
I was SO happy when it worked out! After doing the original flat GIF, and then deciding to do a 3D book version, the idea of attempting a 3D animated version was just too tempting to pass up. As it turned out, the scaling, rotating and skewing of the grouped GIF layers was as easy as the scaling, rotating, and skewing of the original single layer — but I didn’t know if the grouping alignment for the layers was going to work until I got to the animation process. Once I’d done two or three frames and saw that it was going to work, I was ecstatic! After that, it was just a car chase.