The Xara Trompe L'Oeil Room Page 10
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Click New Frame to add another frame to the animation. Paste (Shift Ctrl V) the bitmap and wedge onto the page.

Click twice on the wedge to enter rotate/skew mode. Drag the rotation bulls eye to the tip of the wedge. Hold down the Ctrl key and rotate the wedge 30 degrees clockwise.

Select the wedge shape and bitmap and Combine Shapes > Intersect Shapes. Apply a Linear transparency.

Repeat these steps until you have 13 frames with a wedge shape in frames 2-13. Remember, frame one contains the background image of the gray version.

Press the Preview Animation in Browser button on the Infobar. This launches your default Browser and displays the animation.

The default palette options create a very large file and this file is enormous to begin with.

Press the Export Animated Gif button. In the export dialog, press Options to open the Animation Export Options dialog (shown on the left).

Select the Animation Colors tabbed section. Using Error Diffusion creates a much larger file size and for an animation of this size it is not an option, so set the Dithering to None. The Global Browser Palette option is normally a safe choice, but in this case it failed to reproduce the rainbow colors in the animated wedge.

After trying a multitude of palette options, I finally selected the Global Optimized Palette option which lets Xara pick the best 256 (or fewer) colors. I experimented a bit and wound up using 70 colors. The file size is still quite robust, about 96K. On the other hand, once the visitor has loaded the animation into her or his Browser, it will remain cached and will load instantly the next time he or she visits the site.

Preview Animation in Browser provides useful information in addition to displaying your animation in real time as it will appear on the Web.

As you can see on the left, under the animation is a description of the image's palette, dithering, image size in pixels as well as bytes and a table of modem speeds and load times.

I assume most of you will be connecting at 28.8K and above and so even though the load time is about one half a minute, the next time you load the image it will load much faster.

So what does the final animation look like? Press the right > button.