[Boot Animation] Tryed one just for fun...

[kc.rkitek]

So, after wading through pages of stuff over @ XDA, I thought I'd read up on creating boot animations. In concept, it seemed really pretty easy, so I made a humble (more like feeble) attempt to make my own.

Yeah, it seemed easy enough...but in practice, it's pretty damn time consuming. Here's what I ended up with after a few hours of mind-numbing image manipulation:



Mind you, I made the sequence into a dithered animated gif and resized a bit for web display, so the quality isn't quite as good as it is on the phone...you get the idea though. The first part (up until it turns cyan) cycles only once, then the last part (pulsating with the CM text) repeats endlessly until the phone finishes booting.

Anyway, I started with a little android guy I modeled in Sketchup and exported a handful of png's. Since I'm not very versed in creating animations, I then imported them all into PS as layers and tweaked the transparency each frame in the sequence. I'm sure there's a faster and easier way to accomplish this, but it's not really in my skill set...

Please share your comments/criticism...

[WERA689]

I'll say this: I could never do that!

[kc.rkitek]

Well, it's definitely not the easiest thing I've ever done and for flying by the seat of my pants, I think it came out pretty ok. I really wanted the little android guy to rotate, but as it is this little exercise was a HUGE test of my patience!! May I'll try something a little more complicated later...

[Budske]

what program did u use?? its great, but it could use a turbosmooth (3DS max)

[Robbob533]

Congrats! This looks awesome! I can't believe you actually did that. I am a programmer but I suk at art. So I give you props!

[kc.rkitek]

I used sketchup...mainly because I already had an android model. I could have done the "soften/smooth edges", but I didn't think about it until I was already done! Otherwise, it would have looked more like this:



Oh well...next time!

[Budske]

hahaha, dont worry, its great anyways...

maybe if u teach me how to do it... i can make some 3D model animated and spining and everything :P..

or i just give u the images :P

[ScottyPimpin]

That's pretty sweet! certainly a good start in the right direction now we need the android to appear, a gun in his hand and he start shooting an iphone lol

[kc.rkitek]

Thanks all..

maybe if u teach me how to do it... i can make some 3D model animated and spining and everything :P..

First, I've been told that you do not need to be rooted, but you must have the Android SDK. I'm rooted, so I have no idea if non-rooted people can actually do this...I suppose if they try, they'll find out soon enough! So, if you're interested in trying this yourself, I'll try to explain. Bear with me; this is going to be a long one!!

Without further ado, here's the procedure (for windows), assuming you've already set up the Android SDK and installed the SDK usb driver:

1) First, get a hold of the stock bootanimation.zip; there a couple ways to go about this-

Rooted folks can pull it via adb from /system/media...I just pulled it to the root of my C: drive like so:

adb pull /system/media/bootanimation.zip /bootanimation.zip

Non-rooted users can download it here: http://www.4shared.com/file/25453609...animation.html

2) Extract the zip and inspect the contents. Inside you'll find 2 directories, "part0" and "part1", that are each full of consecutively numbered .png files...these are all the frames of your animation. You'll also have a file called "desc.txt". This little guy tells your N1 how to display the animation. Let's open that txt file and have a look inside...here's what you'll find in the stock "desc.txt" file:

512 256 30
p 1 0 part0
p 0 0 part1

Sort of cryptic, huh? It's not so bad really...
First line:
512 = width of the images/animation
256 = height of the images/animation
30 = frames per second
Second line:
p = this is unknown
1 = number of times to replay this sequence
0 = pause in frames...i guess 0 is none. not sure it's use really.
part0 = naturally, the directory of the images for this sequence
Third line:
p = again, this is unknown
0 = number of times to replay this sequence...0 means infinite repeat
0 = pause in frames...again, not sure it's use really.
part1 = again, the directory of the images for this sequence

you with me so far? good!

3. Now all you have to do is create an animation, covert it to consecutive pngs numbered 00001-whatever (just like the stock animation), and edit the desc.txt to make it do what you want. I sort of followed the timeframe of the original animation...a little over 3 seconds (95 frames) for part0 and about 1.5 seconds (45 frames) for part1. Also, my animation frames are portrait orientation so the first line of my desc.txt is actually "256 512 30".

If you make the sequences too long, they won't fully display; at least not the last one. When your N1 finishes booting, it ends the boot animation, finished or not. If you don't care about having "part1" cycle a few times, I suppose you could make "part0" a little longer...say around 4 seconds or 120 frames.

4. When you're all finished, rezip the 2 directories and the desc.txt, but you need to set the compression method to "store"...in other words, no compression. I used winrar for this...select the 2 dirs and desc.txt file, right-click, add to archive, change name to bootanimation.zip, change archive format to zip, change compression method to store, and hit ok. Just like so:



When it's done, move your new bootanimation.zip to your Android SDK "tools" directory.

5) Ok, let's push this thing to the phone! Turn on usb debugging on your phone (settings>applications>development) & plug in phone to computer. Open a command window from your sdk "tools" directory.

By the way, if you're on XP and don't have that option from the right-click context menu, download this: http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...ertoySetup.exe...all you have to do is right-click on the "tools" directory and select "open command window here". I promise it will make your life much simpler if you don't use cmd a lot! Otherwise, you'll have to cd to the right directory within the cmd window.

In the command window, type the following:

adb devices

this should return a list of devices attached...you should have 1 unique 12-digit serial number. If you don't see a HT9********* device, you probably don't have the usb driver from the SDK installed correctly...look here for answers: USB Driver for Windows | Android Developers

However, if you see the serial#, you're good...proceed!

6) Type the following:

adb push bootanimation.zip /data/local

you should get a response something like "xxx KB/s (xxxxxxx bytes in x.xxxs)". If so, it's on there. Reboot to see it in action! If you want, you can force a reboot via adb like so:

adb reboot

Congrats...you did it!!

Now, say you're tired of you new boot animation and want to go back to the stock one...easy! Repeat step 5 to get back to the adb command wind, only this time we'll enter an adb shell:

adb shell

now you'll see a "#" sign. type this:

rm /data/local/bootanimation.zip

and hit enter, of course. Then get out of the shell by typing at the next "#":

exit

and enter again.
You should be out of the shell, so reboot to verify the custom boot animation is gone. Again, you can do this via adb; type:

adb reboot

And just like that, you're back to the old boot animation!

That's it folks...piece of cake, right? You deserve a pint; have one on me...

[Budske]

really easy... i will start making a fully 3d character, or render to animate...