Making and uploading your Avatar

[AbsoluteDestiny]

Hi all,

As you can see, the site has a new forum with avatar capabilities so here's a little guide to how to personalise your forum presence with an avatar.


Avatars hosted on the .org

At the moment, you can host your avatar on the org but there are certain limitations:

• 1) You are limited to 100x100 pixels - this is a good thing, you should not really have an avatar bigger than this.
  
  2) Your avatar must be less than 16k

Well, 16k should be pretty easy for a still avatar that is compressed in gif format. Yes, GIF. Patents aside it is the best compression for avatars and simple graphics.

Animated gifs can be made with a variety of tools. One tool that many amv makers will have already is Adobe Premiere, which can export movies as animated gifs.

Be warned - if you make animated gifs with Premiere, make sure you select options like Optimize Stills and lower the framerate.

Another popular tool which can easily handle animated gifs is Paint Shop Pro

N.B. The more complex your animation, the larger the gif will be. If you can animate something looping with just 3 or 4 frames, that is ideal. Also, feel free to use the transparency option with a gif for maximum effect ^_^


Avatars hosted externally

If you are finding it difficult to keep your avatar under the 16k limit, then you may want to sign up for the free avatar hosting service at:

http://www.yoursighost.com

They allow 3 images to be hosted that can be as large as 50k. I wouldn't recommend going that high but it's a good option for gifs bigger than the 16k limit on the org and you can use them on as many boards as you like.

N.B. Even with external hosts, please keep the image size lower than 100x100 pixels otherwise you will mess up the look of the forum.

Can't be bothered to make your own?

There's hundreds available on the net that people have made already for you but BE WARNED: Do Not Use Custom Avatars that people already use. If you download an image off an avatar site then that is fine but do not use other people's personal avatars.

If you don't know where to look for avatars, here's a start:

Anime Avatars


OK, I think that's all for now.

If I can think of any more salient avatar info, I'll edit this post

[turboneko]

Nice post Ian!

Btw Phade... I was reading in the forum description "read the FAQ before": any luck you are gonna incorporate our FAQ and make it become "official"?

[Harper]

Helped out a lot. I'll try the GIF thing when I've got more time (but boy, I had to cut Akuma's legs off to get it under the 80 pixel limit. Whew. You'd think it could be cumilitive (as in 6400 pixels), as the width was well below 80, but my height was just ten or fifteen pixels above 80. A small pain. Is there some way to incorporate that, or should I just shut up, smile and thank the heavens that they allow avatars at all? I dunno, seems silly to limit you to a straight-up 80x80 limit instead of allowing other dimensions, but hey, that's just lil' ol me.

[AbsoluteDestiny]

Well, it doesn't have to be 80x80 but it really shouldn't be any bigger.

Mine is 80x60, mainly because its from an anime screenshot so I wanted to keep the same aspect ratio.

Also, if your program allows you to export as a gif you might want to try it as it's a much cleaner compressor for small images like this (you dont get as much muckiness but you do get fewer colours sometimes so you have to weigh it)

Also don't be afraid to zoom in an clean up a picture manually. Often when you shrink something the detail gets lost but ends up making your image look a bit crap so sometimes you have to touch it up yourself.

Oh and always do bicubic or billinear resizes instead of Nearest Neighbour because they look best (dont know if you did or not, I'm just mentioning it ^^)

[Vega Sailor]

How do I upload an Avatar?

[Lyrs]

How do I upload an Avatar?

Go into "Profile" at the center and top of the page. Scroll down and you'll see the "upload" option for avatars.

/end

[Bahamut God]

I can't seem to use an external host for my avatar. It's over 6 k, so I'm not hosting it on the site, but it is 80x80.

I put in the url in the porfile options, but it does not show up.

Here is the link.



This is the small one.

This is the larger one I would rather use.



Any idea what's going wrong?

[Phade]

Hey Bahamut God,

The url to your avatar is too long. Find a way to shorten it somehow and it will work just fine.

Phade.

[Bahamut God]

Oh, ok... I guess i can change the name of the file to something else.

*goes off to try that*

How much shorter does it have to be?

*goes off to try*

The only thing I can change is the name, I made it 4 letters + .gif

[Bahamut God]

Poop, it's still to long.

It's a mac site, and it's a templet thing. I can only make the url 3 spaces shorter.

Am I out of luck? I can't host my own avatar? (I know avatar looks kind of gify, I took aobut 3 hours making it. It's my first.)

Anyone know how to make these things with out them looking like ass? (I was working from the dvd here...)

-_-

this is the new url.

http://homepage.mac.com/bahamut_god/.cv ... 40_105.gif