2016-08-10 ~ Three.js to Animated GIF R7

[theo-armour]

Mount Everest

@jaanga/terrain

Elevations View to Animated GIF

It took less than a day to create an app that can run Elevations View and create an animated GIF of a 360 degree rotation.

There are some caveats:

The app supports a palette of 16 million colors. Each map appears to have palettes of over at least 500 colors. Animated GIFs only support a palette of up to 256 colors. Writing a script that reduces the number of colors seems not easy. The very easy route is to reduce the colors to a gray scale. This we are doing.

GitHub issue supports dragging and dropping of image files up to 10 MB in size. This means we are creating files only of 320 by 240 pixels and with a rotation that might not be quite as smooth as wanted.

The question in all this is: why?

The response is that we want to eat out dog food as much as possible. We are about live, interactive 3D.

There are time when 3D just simply is not available

These places include:

• In email
• In GitHub issues
• In GitHub Read me files

I the past, we used links. Then we made the links bigger by turning them into headers.

But no matter how big you make a link, it's still one or two words describing a picture worth thousands of words.

More recently we have started adding images to the links. These are a great help, but the images are static. They give little indication that thing you will click on can move.

And so we come to the animated GIFs. They are not fully interactive but - hopefully - they indicate potential interaction if you click on one of them.