Tutorial: How to create and apply your own custom Android boot animation

Yesterday, I wrote a guide to creating and applying a static boot screen for Android phones instead of the default animation that usually is displayed. Thus, it seemed appropriate with a tutorial for making a full boot animation as well. You naturally need a rooted Android device for this to work.

1. Download TechCredo’s boot animation template here. It’s a ZIP-archive, so extract all its contents to the folder of your choice on your computer.
2. Create a series of images in the .png format that will form your animation. The dimension of these images is not essential, since the pictures can be stretched to any size by editing desc.txt. But if your phone has the WVGA resolution, you might want to make the images 400×240 pixels. The images don’t have to take up the entire screen, either: the pictures in the default Nexus One boot animation are 256×512 pixels.
3. The images will be played in a sequence decided by their file names when you boot your phone. Name the first image name_0000.png, the next image name_0001.png and so forth in the order you want them. Place the pictures in the part0 folder located in TechCredo’s template.
4. When you have created all the images for your animation, edit desc.txt to your liking by following the instructions in the guide at the bottom of this post. The file desc.txt contains the description for Android boot animations.
5. On your computer, add the part0 folder and desc.txt to a ZIP-file called bootanimation.zip. Please note that you must use the Store compression method, or the boot animation won’t work.
6. Next, copy the bootanimation.zip you just created to the /data/local folder located in TechCredo’s template. Then add the entire data and META-INF folders to a new ZIP-archive with the name of your choice. Copy the ZIP-file to your Android’s SD card and flash the file as usual via Recovery Mode. Voilà. You should see your new custom boot animation when you restart your Android.

This is how the desc.txt file works

First of all, I really recommend Notepad++ for editing desc.txt.  Then you’ll know for sure that the integrity and format of the file will be intact. This is what the desc.txt that is included with TechCredo’s template looks like in Notepad++:

• The first values, 480 and 800 specify the width and the height of the animation. These values don’t need to match the size of the images, since the images can be stretched.
• The third value, 20, specifies the number of frames per second for your animation (i.e. the speed).
• “p” is just a delimiter and means nothing, but 0 defines how many times the animation will be looped. Using 0 here means that the animation will be looped infinitely until the boot process is completed. The second “0” specifies the number of frames during which the animation will be paused after the entire sequence of .PNGs has been played one time. So if you enter 10 for example, the animation will be paused for 10 fps before the animation is resumed.
• Next, part0 specifies the name of the folder where the animation images are stored. I guess you could use any name here as long as it’s the name of the folder, but I haven’t seen people using any other name than “part0″, so it might be there for a reason.
• As for the final “p” – no idea why it’s needed, but removing it seemed to kill my animation.

This is what the desc.txt for the standard Nexus One boot animation looks like:

It has an additional line of code: “p 0 0 part1”, and it specifies the folder containing the second part of the animation if you want to split it up. Other than that, the numbers mean the same thing as in the example above.

Before flashing a new custom ROM, you can just open the ROM ZIP-archive and replace the bootanimation.zip that comes with the ROM with your own boot animation if you want to use that one instead. Good luck!