by Melissa Raissa

Created on: February 12, 2010

The Spinning Globe is one of the preset animation filters you can find in GIMP. With this feature, you can turn any graphic or text image into a rotating sphere. The image will be expanded at the middle then tapered at the top and bottom for it to be molded to the sphere surface. Square-shaped images will render a perfect sphere while rectangular images will render oblate spheroids.

Contrary to its given name, the Spinning Globe filter doesn't generate a world map image so you'll have to look for a map which you can then transform to a rotating globe. For uniformity, we will be using use a rectangular world map image with vertical and horizontal lines in order to help us see how the map is rendered using this filter.

Choosing Map Images

You have to use an image with large dimensions since the Spinning Globe filter can reduce your current to image to half its original size. A huge part of the upper and lower areas of your image will get cut off when you use the Spinning Globe filter. If you don't want these areas to be cropped, you can add some allowance to your canvas.

Open your world map image with GIMP then click IMAGE->CANVAS SIZE at the menu bar. Unlock the chain link toggle at the right sight of the Height and Width settings to allow adjustment of only the height or width of your image. We have to increase the Canvas Height settings to approximately 1/5 or 120% of the original height. We will now vertically align the image using the ALIGNMENT Tool.

After increasing the canvas size, click on the map image then activate the ALIGNMENT Tool at the Toolbox or click TOOLS->TRANSFORM TOOLS->ALIGN at the menu bar. At the Align Tool Options, choose the middle alignment to center the map image. Once the image is centered, click IMAGE->FLATTEN IMAGE at the menu bar. This will help retain the top and bottom areas of your current image.

If your image doesn't have equal height and width dimensions, you will end up with an oblate instead of a perfect sphere shape. If you don't mind this, you can go ahead and apply the Spinning Globe filter to see the result. However, if you want an even-shaped sphere, you might want to scale the image along with the allowance we added earlier using the SCALE Tool before applying the animation filter.

Create A Spinning Globe

At the menu bar, click FILTERS->ANIMATION->SPINNING GLOBE which will open the corresponding dialog box. The FRAMES settings will give you the number of phases that it will render for your image. The ideal number of frames is around 50 for a good rotating globe effect. However, a higher number of frames will take longer to render especially if you have a large image file.

After applying the filter, you will get multiple animation frame layers which you can view by clicking FILTERS->ANIMATION->PLAYBACK at the menu bar. Finally, save the file as GIF making sure that you select the SAVE AS ANIMATION option at the Export File dialog box. At the following dialog, the LOOP FOREVER box should be checked before you click SAVE.

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