Show HN: Svgasm – SVG animation from single GIF using tracer

Show HN: Svgasm – SVG animation from single GIF using tracer(github.com)

49 points by tomkwok 5 years ago | 6 comments

tomkwok 5 years ago |

Hi HN readers. I created this command-line tool called svgasm to automate the generation of an SVG animation from a lot of SVG files. Originally I made this tool to create a dumb SVG animation from a bunch of matplotlib SVG exports. Then, I had the idea of using this method to sequence traced/vectorized versions of raster frames extracted from a GIF to create a time-discretized SVG animation, which is found to be generally aesthetically pleasing and smaller in file size. I created a bunch of GIF vs SVG side-by-side comparison examples with some interesting GIFs that I found online. The examples can be viewed on https://github.com/tomkwok/svgasm. Please tell me if the SVG animations work on your laptop/PC, especially the more complex SVGs like the infinity spiral example.

alecst 5 years ago | |

Looks great for me on my old MacBook Air, 10.14. And you picked a great set of images. The svgasm of the lions really struck me, it was almost art in its own right -- how you might see the lions if you weren't looking at the details, but just the feeling. Projecting my own emotions maybe, but really cool stuff and pretty inspiring that it took so little time to implement.

tomkwok 5 years ago | | |

Thank you for your interest. What browser do you use? It seems to work better on Safari on my MBA.

Also, as stated on my GitHub page I used primitive [1] for the lions example. What svgasm adds to primitive and other tracer tools is the ability to process a GIF (or a sequence of images) and make an SVG animation out of the sequence.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12539109