When I look back at all of the documentation I wrote for artists, and a lot of the conversations I’ve had with art leads and directors – one of the most critical ways to communicate changes, or instructions was to provide animated gifs. I’m not a huge fan of video tutorials – they typically are too long for the amount of content they cover and are typically very barebones and hard to use as reference. On the flipside, a long wall of text with dozens of images can also be hard to digest.

A happy middle ground I’ve found has been short text blurbs with animated GIFs. GIFs loop, they can be fairly long and add a lot to the wow factor. They are also much easier to embed onto online wikis like Confluence – infact they are just as easy as images, simply drag and drop or copy/paste into the text.

And thanks to GIFCam – they are just as easy to make (and it’s free!) : http://blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/

Just like FRAPs, GifCam is great when capturing openGL and DirectX applications, and was the best way to document and demonstrate material and tool workflows.