Create your own avatar app

[earion]

Hey there... long time reader first time poster. :)
A client of mine asked me if it was possible to create a flash-based "create your own avatar" app. For reference you can check http://www.sp-studio.de/
The trick is... they want their characters to be animated !
And they want to user to be able to output a gif that could be used for a cell-phone logo or a msn emoticon, etc.
I thought that maybe using motion paths and attachMovie(); could work. As to the gif output, I thought maybe php could have an answer to my prayers with imaging libraries such as GD or Image Magick.
I'm having serious doubts as to whether this thing is doable at all... Could you guys point me towards the right direction or maybe indicate me a different type of technology I could use for this project ??

[Glen Charles Rowell]

You could just add animated body parts to solve one of your problems but then saving the gif or animation might be hard.

Glen Charles Rowell

[earion]

Yeah that's my biggest concern... how could i "capture" what the user selected in flash and have it exported to an animated gif. I don't think either GD or Imagemagick can composite animated gifs unfortunately....

[Cota]

I'd say you're out of luck on this matter. Not trying to ruin the parade or anything, but think about it. You'd have to be able to save the client animated movieclip into its own SWF....from there converting it should be all that bad. But getting it there, thats the mission. Unless you made some sort of server application to take data in, compile it to an SWF then convert. That might be a road worth exploring.

[Glen Charles Rowell]

You might have to tell the users about using the PrtSc button and then getting the character that way. Or make a heap of premade swfs for users to download. ...I just thought of an idea...
You might be able to make one swf that checks if there are any other swfs in the same directory. Then if the user has those swf files in the same folder opening the first one links the bits together :D I'm not sure how you would upload this to msn or other programs but you would just need a heap of if statements. And don't forget to set the layers so all the bits go in the right place

1 skin color
2 eyes
3 pants
ect...

Glen Charles Rowell

[newblack]

i hate to jumpstart a parade that should have died in the rain, but provided you have the physical .gif creation down, it shouldn't be too hard at all. you just have to think up a way to searialize the users' data.

take a look at this project i had worked on this semester: http://www.jellytank.com

users can save very unique and visually different tanks because all that matters to the application are certain numerical properties. find a way to break down what you're trying to save, and you'll be set.

[earion]

newblack, you're absolutely right... Flash doesn't have the capabilites to do such a thing so i'll just use it to do the preview.
i checked your fishtank project, it's great !

Since the output is gif anyway I was thinking about having all the customization/preview for the enduser done in flash.
Then develop a php script that gathers all the variables selected in flash (ie: eye#2 + shoes#5 with body#6) and then that puts them (the corresponding gif elements) together and output them to the browser...
I'm not really sure this is viable though because i don't think the image manipulation libraries are capable of compositing animated gifs.

Either that or start running an avatar sweatshop in my basement... with a little bell that rings everytime a user wants a new one... might be cheaper, eh ? =)

[newblack]

Either that or start running an avatar sweatshop in my basement... with a little bell that rings everytime a user wants a new one... might be cheaper, eh ? =)
now THAT'S dynamic. i haven't looked, but my guess would be there's nothing uber straight-forward about an animated .gif creation script... but i guarantee something modifiable is out there.