Animated Profile Artwork & My Tips From Learning

The other day I created my first profile artwork shown above (nothing too amazing but just right for what I wanted), and it was definitely a learning experience. Trying to keep the file size under 8mb was probably the biggest challenge, along with not understanding what to do to upload them to appear correctly on my profile at first. I found it a little bit of a challenge that I wasn't expecting so figured I'd share the software/websites I used and any tips I had.

Introduction

The other day I created my first profile artwork shown above or viewable by clicking my profile at the time of writing (nothing too amazing but just right for what I wanted), and it was definitely a learning experience. Trying to keep the file size under 8mb was probably the biggest challenge, along with not understanding what to do to upload them to appear correctly on my profile at first. I found it a little bit of a challenge that I wasn't expecting so figured I'd share the software/websites I used and any tips I had. Think of it as a very informal tutorial.

Asset Choices

First off, I wanted to pick a background that would work well integrated into the art. I recommend taking a browse through this community guide if you're stuck for ideas, I've bookmarked quite a few thanks to it and it's where I ended up picking mine from. Another option for browsing is steam.tools[steam.tools] where you can browse by hues, brightness, saturation, name, game, date, price or random.



To see how they would appear used as profile art, I used the website steam.design[steam.design], which in addition to previewing the page allows you to generate a .zip file containing the templates for the art spaces with the backgrounds cropped out for you. Make sure you have long images toggled on for this type of profile.



If you want to create your artwork from scratch without a background, I recommend the following dimensions for templates:
Profile Picture - 164 x 164 pixels
Main Artwork - 506 x 808 pixels
Side Artwork: 100 x 808 pixels
Making sure the dimensions stay right proportionally is very important, or you'll likely get stuck with an error symbol or line for your artwork.

As for the content on top, it's entirely up to you. For the avatar, I decided to create the Puma lineart myself using GIMP[www.gimp.org], a free artwork program similar to Photoshop, using the pathing tool and filling in selections from it. For the artworks, I used Sony Vegas 13.0 (while I know many people also use After Effects) to make a five second video for each part. I ended up deciding to put my name on the right and a welcoming message with some graphics in the centre, but you could include an about me, other profile info, the games you play etc. or just some cool effects.

It's only limited by your imagination (and skill, I guess)!

Exporting

While exporting the avatar may be straight forward, making the GIFs is a little trickier.

I had a fair bit of trial and error using different methods, compilers, compressors etc. until I found what worked for me. I first tried exporting both the videos made in Sony Vegas as MP4s, but found most MP4 to GIF options were limited, so ended up exporting them as image sequences instead.



I tried using gifmaker.me to compile the image sequence into a gif, however found that for no apparent reason it would cut off some pixels from the true size, which when compressed and uploaded led to errors in displaying in the showcase. I ended up going back into GIMP and opening all of the image sequence as new layers.



I then exported it as a gif and with the settings set for 30fps as that's the rate I was using in Sony Vegas - if you're trying to keep sizes down you could work with less frames in the editor in the first place at the expense of it potentially being less smooth.

Compressing

Phew, you've finished making your gif, time to upload right? Unlikely. Steam has a 8mb limit on artwork uploads, and my 5 second gif loop was closer to 26mb. I tried a few compressors until I found what worked for me.

I first tried ezgif.com's[ezgif.com] compressor, and while it gave many different options on compression I found none of them were reducing the size enough and most of them led to a bad loss of quality (for example, the blooming light effects in my gifs were turning solid colour). May be useful if you're just over the 8mb mark, but not my top choice.



Eventually I found http://www.iloveimg.com/ and it was perfect. It managed to bring down the file size to 5.24mb in one compression using no other sites. It appeared to be using lossy gif compression, but the quality difference definitely wasn't bad for such a big reduction.



Comparison of original GIF quality to compressed here.[imgur.com]

Uploading & Showcase

So now you have the right file size, just upload it the normal way? Nope. By default Steam does weird resizing things when you upload an artwork that is too big. The video below gives a whole tutorial on Long Style Steam Profile GIF Making, but specifically from 5:11 onwards explains the process for uploading.

The short of it is that you need to go to this link, open the gif as a file and put in the name & description, but before uploading press F12, go to "console" and paste in the following before pressing enter:

document.getElementsByName("image_width")[0].value =1000;document.getElementsByName("image_height")[0].value = 1;

Tick the box and upload. You should use this method for both of the GIFs. You might notice that the value in the code here is changed from 999999 to 1000, this is to help avoid the issue of the artwork not showing up when you click it on your profile.

Once you've got both artworks uploaded and previewing right, go into your profile settings, add an artwork showcase (you must be Steam Level 10+ to have showcases) and put the main art in the bigger box and the side art in the top right box, leaving the other boxes blank. If you followed things correctly, once saved it should come out looking perfect on your profile. If not, check to see if you skipped any steps.

Conclusion and References

That pretty much wraps it up, I didn't really go into creating the videos in Sony Vegas because that's a very individual thing, but otherwise if you have any questions post them down below and I'll try and answer/update with them.

Software/Website References:
> Background Browsing - TheOddFox's Best Background Guide and steam.tools[steam.tools]
> Background Previewing/Cropping - steam.design[steam.design]
> Video Editing - Sony Vegas or After Effects recommended. Alternatively, a photomanipulation program can be used however requires editing layer by layer.
> GIF Compiling - GIMP[www.gimp.org], Photoshop or any other well-equipped photo manipulation software that handles layers and animated gifs.
> GIF Compression - First choice iLoveIMG[www.iloveimg.com], Second choice EzGif[ezgif.com]

Also, just to show how much trouble I went through trying to get a couple of GIFs to work right the first time:



Please do drop a like/fav/comment if it helped out at all!

[[TTV] pumacatrun2]

No problem! I like how colourful your profile is haha.

[xy]

Thank you for this guide! I didn't know that GIMP can export to GIF. My Photoshop can't export to GIF for some reason and this guide saved my profile :D