For the Irish amongst us, St Patrick’s day is rolling around again. Don’t forget our pot-of-gold animation that lets you decide who you’d like to see at the end of the rainbow:

And there’s also the ever-popular if somewhat bizarre float-a-picture-on-the-Chicago-River, which is dyed green for Paddy’s day every year:

Enjoy!

Animation output was broken on some generators recently Sorry, should be fixed now! Thanks to [lara] for the report.

On the plus side, we’ve been improving the animation-making interface. The movie button has been made (hopefully) more prominent, and there’s a clearer movie scroll bar for moving back and forth between frames. Also, you can choose between animations that are cheap-and-cheerful and fast to make, and animations that are slower to make but clearer — just click on the movie icon, and then on either the grainy “fast” button or the crisp “slow” button. Suggestions for cleverer icons are very welcome :-).

In preparation for Valentine’s day, we’ve just added a butterfly animation that looks like this:

To put your own beloved in the picture, just click here (if you think you recognize the butterfly, that’s because it comes from the Big Buck Bunny movie - thanks to the Blender Foundation for releasing their characters into the wild under a friendly license!).

And don’t forget, there’s plenty of other equally romantic designs lying around from Valentine’s past: Heart lockets, heart showers, candles, wine bottles, … we’re doing our best for you on the 14th!

We hope your new year is an animated one! This year has been a busy one for MakeSweet. From time to time, heavy traffic has forced us to limit generation of animations on our site. In 2010, that should be a thing of the past. For a preview of what is to come, see our New Year 2010 animation generator.

When you add your pictures or words to the animation, you’ll find a new “movie” button. This creates a custom GIF animation that you can save on your computer. So far, so familiar. What is new is that all work is done on your computer, rather than ours. So we can keep this service free for all to use as they like, without bankrupting ourselves. And your photos never leave your computer, so you can be even more sure of your privacy.

And, for distributors of MakeSweet generators, this removes the last requirement for special server support. Now all you need to host a complete, stand-alone generator is a regular webserver. We’ll be updating MakeSweet Live in the new year to reflect the new possibilities.

Happy New Year! (P.S For those that way inclined: our popular Christmas Ornament generator from last year is going strong).

Our animation service has been re-enabled. Please let us know if you have any problems with it. High resolution views and generator creation services are still down for maintenance.

We’ve made a nice and cheesy pot-of-gold animation for Saint Patrick’s day, coming up on March 17. Put a photo or text on the gold coins in a leprechaun’s stash at the end of the rainbow:

We’ve had a bit of internal disagreement about what the treasure in the pot should look like. Noemi thinks the rotating-glowing-globe looks silly. However, she admits that the number of leprechauns she’s met in her lifetime is in the single digits, so I don’t see how come she’s this big expert on pots of gold all of a sudden.

However, if you also think the coin-ball is daft, you can instead float a picture on the surface of the Chicago River, dyed green for Paddy’s day every year:

Enjoy!

We recently added a new design for Valentine’s day (coming up next month) - a shower of hearts set against the rising sun:

By the way, all picture mixer designs now give the code needed to embed them directly in your site or blog.

Enjoy! We should probably do a design for anti-Valentine’s day too…

New addition to the Picture Mixer collection: welcome to Planet 2009, a new year’s animation. Put your photo or words in the year itself, and watch it loom closer and closer.

Happy new year from MakeSweet!

The BlenderArt magazine is a great resource for learning some of the deeper Blender mysteries in a task-oriented way. BlenderArt magazine issue #19 just came out, and it has a great tutorial on setting up a boat’s rigging.

This would have been a big help for our sailboat animation generator! We could certainly make a lot of improvements now.

Tired of the same old Christmas ornaments, year after year? Now you can freshen things up a bit (at least in cyberspace) with this new addition to the picture mixer: a personalized Christmas ornament with your choice of picture or words.

There’s also an animated Christmas tree, but combining the subtle shading of small colored lights with the crude color palette limitations of GIF animations turns out to be not such a great idea…