A series of movies in my LYNDA/LINKEDIN-LEARNING ‘Tips & Tricks’ series cover various aspects of FX animation. I’ve assembled all the movies on the topics into this ‘virtual’ course below. BTW, check out my patreon, there’s going to be a lot of animation resources posted there!
FX ANIMATION TUTORIALS
These courses will demonstrate the technniques that I’ve used to break away from natural animations that were too stiff or ‘physical’, instead capturing the organic and constantly morphing plasmas, particles and liquids of nature.
ANIMATE A FLAME (7m 53s)
Inspired by Eric Goldberg’s ‘Animator’s Crash Guide’, a simple flame animation – a candle or a matchstick, with the surprisingly tricky ‘tear’ effect. Though this is a small example, the principle applies to larger fires, just on a longer timing (add more inbetweens!)
SPLASH (3m 58s)
A single drop of water hits a liquid surface. A very simple phenomenon, but it won’t look right unless you get the timing and the construction right. You also need to learn the principle of keeping the form – well, liquid. It’s not a hard or rigid substance.
OCEAN WAVES (4m 32s)
One of my favourite scenes was this dramatic sailing shot for an Alan Parsons music video. The video was directed by Patrick Read Johnson, who is getting some well deserved attention for his many years in the making movie about star wars fandom, 5-25-77.
OCEAN WAVES (ADVANCED) (6m 3s)
The hardest phenomenon to capture is the organic ‘roiling’ effect in smoke and water. One method you can use to create this is to have a breakdown – as in, use the drawing between your keys to add the undulation, tweening in unexpected ways.
SMOKE POOFS (3m 58s)
Every Looney Tunes cartoon has one of these. They are suprisingly tricky to get right. If you’re not careful, they’ll ‘stick’ and catch the eye, the last thing you want to happen, especially as this is often the punchline of the scene.
SMOKE POOFS (ADVANCED) (4m 35s)
Take all the principles of the previous movie and now apply them to a persective shot, allowing you much greater usage or reuse of the smoke poof – a perspective smoke poof can be recycled in many more scenes than a front-on one.
CYCLES (A-A) (4m 38s)
If you’re working with a puppet / vector based program like AnimateCC (Flash) or Toonboom Harmony, there are tweening tricks that you can use to cheat the hand drawn undulation effect. Though not as high quality, these can be done VERY quickly.
CYCLES (A-B-A) (5m 1s)
An upgrade of the animation in the previous movie, this one adds an extra key or breakdown to make a nicer undulation, one that feels much more feature quality. These principles can be applied to hand drawn scenes also!
FLAGS (6m 8s)
Though not a natural phenomenon, inanimate fabric is often moved by wind. Strictly speaking, flags are not characters, and their motion has much in common with smoke or fire, especially when they flap chaotically in the wind.
FLAGS CYCLING (7m 4s)
I took an old shape-tweened flag animatin and redrew it by hand, as this allowed me to vastly improve on the quality of the motion. This movie gives suggestions on how to replicate the fast / fluttering effect common in flag motions.
ATOMIC MUSHROOM CLOUD (6m 37s)
The longest and most intricate scene I’ve tried yet: a nuclear explosion, along with dramatic debris shattering the camera at the end. This applies all of the techniques covered in the previous movies.
I know this only scratches the surface. For those interested in further reading, my former co-worker Joe Gilland’s book ‘Elemental Magic’ is one of the few dealing with feature quality FX animation. Well worth a look!