The gayest thing in the world is to make one of those animated sigs honoring some fighter.
Hmmm, you have a guy squatting, and the rest of your sig reads;
I don't think he's got much physical strength. When I went to see him fight Gatti, I saw him at the weigh-in and asked myself the question whether or not he was big enough or tough enough to hold me off for 12 rounds. And that'll be the big question once the fight comes along.
-Ricky Hatton
"I'm going to take my time, keep my composure, break him down...and then knock him out. That muthafucka ain't on my level."
- Floyd Mayweather, Jr.
Free programs to make sigis?
Now that depends on what you want to do.
No matter what programs you decide to work with, the kicker is the time and the learning curve and then the time again.
I think the only close program the emulates Photoshop is the gimp which I used while running a Linux box.
Making sigis is not as easy as people think.
A lot goes into making these fucking sigis.
If you are willing to learn, then do it. You are not going to learn this over night that is for sure. If it was that easy every lamer would be doing it.
Commercial software recommended?
Image Editor:
Paint Shop Pro
Photo Shop Pro
Macromedias FireWorks
I use Paint Shop myself, only because I have never wanted to learn PhotoShop.
Although PhotoShop is much better than PaintShop, I have been using PaintShop only because I have not wanted to learn Adobe PhotoShop but that is going to change.
I have a lot of fights so making the gif animation is easy but it's a process of v-dub (Another program that has a very unique learning curve)
I make the vid, resize, save as avi but I use 3 filters and ffshow compress for output
Then I make the gif in touch illusion video master
I put everything together using Ulead Gif animator (I just started using ULEAD like a few weeks ago) Learning curve? Not bad because I have used many other gif animators. You learn as you go, at least I do. I try to never read any tuts lol I just do things by messing around but there are times when I have needed to read a tut or two because somethings you just can't learn on your own because the procedures are far to complicated.
I don't know what to tell you but if you are intrested, you will find your way.
Torrent sites are ok, I much rather use
www.katz.cd
for most of my software but not limited to that.
I know how to do it. Nothing advanced but I know how to use photoshop.