The purpose of this script was to aid creating “rotating” brushes with Gimp. I often use them to create “stamp” brushes (e.g. grunge brushes) without every stamp looking the same. But the script of course can also be to create real rotating brushes like clocks, arrows, logos, whatever. And, yes, you also can create rotating GIFs very easily this way. Just save as a *.gif.

If you have never used Gimp I recommend first looking at the tutorial at http://adrian.gimp.org/gimppipe/.

Usage

First create a new image with one layer (grayscale or transparent RGB, depends) and draw/copy your brush. Keep in mind that the center of your image will later be the center of the rotation. Eventually you have to move the brush layer to archieve this.

Next start the script which can be found in Script-Fu/Layers/Multi rotation if it is properly installed (see below). Now select what the maximum rotation angle should be. I suggest 360 degree for rotating things and 180 or 90 degree if your brush has higher symmetry. Just play around with the settings.

After this you might want to resize the image because the canvas has been enlarged in order to fit the rotated layers.

Finally save your brush as a Gimp animated brush *.gih in you Gimp brush folder.

When I created this script I didn’t know that was already another one created by Rob Antonishen which more or less does the same. It can be found at http://ffaat.pointclark.net/.

Installation

Just download the script below and copy it to your Gimp script folder. On Linux/Unix systems this usually is:

~/.gimp-2.4/scripts

and on Windows systems it should be somewhere in

C:\Documents and Settings\Your User\gimp-2.4\scripts

Can’t remember the exact location. It has been a while since I have used Gimp on Windows…

Download

• multirotate.scm (22 B, Gimp 2.4, GPL)
  

Known Bugs

After the script created the new layers you need to select/click a different layer in order to update the Gimp image window.

By the way, this is my first Scheme script. So I’m glad that it works (for me) at all.

Tags: Gimp, Scripts, Software

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.