Forum Moderators: not2easy
2D Space Triangles:
1) Animated gif's can be created with freebee programs found by searching the web. With this technique you would create each part of the revolution of each triangle as a separate file and insert it into the gif animator. This will produce a relatively small file that can be played by any browser with no plug-in required.
3D Space Triangles:
1) If the triangles spin in 3D you will need to create an animation in a 3D program such as 3DStudio Max. It would be way outside the scope of this post to go into using Max, as it has a pretty steep learning curve. Perhaps someone else has a simple solution to creating 3D animation, I don't. The animation once created in Max can be exported to numerous formats that can be placed in web pages.
As I said, there may be some fine and knowledgeable folks here with a simpler way I just happen to use Max for these types of animations.
Flash also has a steep learning curve but is excellent for creating small animated graphics and could be used to render 2D or 3D.
But there will always be a population of users who do not have flash player installed :(
If they can spin on a single plane in 2D then an animated gif would work.
Something like this may take up a lot of frames and, as limbo says, will make the .gif huge.
The alternative is to do it in flash - this is easier and the file will be much smaller. A good thing to do to ensure compatability is to save the file as a Flash 4 file (97% of browsers should be able to see this). For the rest - if the flashplayer is not detected then you already have the static .gif logo - just have this display for people who are still sans flash.
