Hello everyone! I’m using version 1.5.7 to create a watch face with background animation. I tried all the options for several days, but I can’t get smooth animation without freezes and brakes on my galaxy watch 4. I have seen watch faces from other manufacturers and their animation is very smooth without freezing. Can you please share your secret?
I made a looped animation in After Effect for 3 seconds. Composition at 15 frames per second. Got 45 images 350 by 350 pixels. Shrink each image to 10 kilobytes. Uploaded to Watch Face Studio as an animation for 45 pictures, as a GIF file up to 700 kilobytes, as Webp up to 600 kilobytes. The animation always takes a long time to load, sometimes it slows down and seems to consume more battery than usual. This is normal?
For example, this watch face. It’s interesting to know which is best. Make a gif file, webp, or a set of images? And what is the recommended file size will not slow down on the clock. I tried all the options and didn’t notice much difference.
It’s worth noting that it was created using an older WFS 1.3.13.
I’ve noticed some devs have reported that animations look a lot less smooth when using newer WFS versions for whatever reason…
Hopefully this will be fixed with the next WFS version, as it’s one of the many reasons I’m still using 1.3.13.
For this watch face I’ve used a series of PNG images for the animation, which have been additionally optimized to minimize their size as much as possible.
All images are 450x450 (even though they don’t take up the whole screen). It’s not recommended to resize images additionaly in WFS, as it can impact performance, at least in my experience.
Even with this method, animations are not always perfectly smooth and can sometimes stutter or slow down. Wear OS still isn’t great at handling animations.
However, this stuttering seems to depend mostly on how much data is being processed in the background and how many apps are open and/or active.
In a way, an animated watch face can serve as a clear indicator when it’s time to clear recent apps.
I’d recommend that you try using a sequence of optimized 450x450 PNG images.
If there’s still some visible stutter in animation, it might just be due to the latest WFS version.
I am so glad that you answered me in such detail about your work. Thank you! Probably the same problem in the version of watch face studio. I have your watch face and it animates perfectly. In three days of experimenting, I could not achieve such a smooth animation. I even used the webp format with maximum compression, 15 frames, and still the animation slowed down. My watch face has a gyro effect and I had to turn it off. Because when the gyro effect was working, the animation even completely stopped. I really hope that samsung will fix this in the new version.
