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My daughter wants to create some animated avitars for a forum she goes to and I am not sure what programs you would use to make them.

Can anyone please help us out?

Thanks

The best app would be Adobe Imageready, make the image in photoshop and import it into ImageReady, make the animation and save it as an animated GIF. The easiest way is to make a different layer for every frame you want to use, that way you can show layer 1 in frame 1 and layer 2 in frame 2,... be sure to make a loop so your animation restarts after the last frame...

Just so I understand this:

An image/layer needs to be created for every "movement" that you want the animated avitar to do?
So if you want the avitar to animate spelling "sun" for example, you would need an image/layer for s, one for u and one for n

Thank you very much for the help.

Yep, that's right! Although there are programs out there that remove the monotony of actually having to create each and every layer.

And I can imagine that the programs that do that are quite expensive.
Springing for Photoshop was enough for me.

Actually, not so expensive. The most complete app for animation would be Flash MX, which can do things far beyond simple animation.

I guess you have imageready so that should have some good things. The term used would be to tween between two or more states.