Fire! Making a sun with flames shooting off of it.

jhbmw007 · Post by **jhbmw007** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 7:05 pm

I want to make a cartoon sun and give him fire effects going along his outline. He'll have a face and arms- I'd like to have dancing flames going around the circle that is his body, and also up and down his arms (and each of his fingers should also be like a little flame). Also, it'd be great to have his arms and fingers controlled by bones.

I'd probably want him to look something like one of these, but with arms and animated! (Just did a quick google image search):

http://www.dermatology.co.uk/media/imag ... artoon.gif

http://www.webweaver.nu/clipart/img/nat ... on-sun.jpg

byanfu · Post by **byanfu** » Sun Apr 08, 2007 8:21 am

Hi jhbmw007,

The two pics that you showed are both in a cartoon style. Most likely point animation on the fire effects would work, you can get away with a lot buy suggestive animation in this style. Even just three or four switch files might work.

Good luck.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Sun Apr 08, 2007 9:46 am

Here's a trick that might work.

On the vector tab of the layer properties there is animated noise for fills and lines. Play with those and it "wiggles" the lines. You could do this on any type of shape but you need to have at least a few "pointy" bits sticking out to get the flames.

http://www.lowrestv.com/moho_stuff/sun.mov

http://www.lowrestv.com/moho_stuff/sun.moho

You could also try a custom brush for the stroke with angle jittering. Similar effect.

-vern

jorgy · Post by **jorgy** » Mon Apr 09, 2007 3:42 am

Heyvern, that is very, very nice. You whipped that out pretty quickly! Nice job with the gradient and the noise.

I was wondering about the animated noise yesterday. I was trying for an effect where the noise was "too fast". You can change the offset and scale, but I was wanting to slow it down so that it wasn't vibrating at such a fast rate. My only thought was to render it at normal speed, then slow it down in a video editor, but that would be a pain.

Any other ideas?

jorgy

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Mon Apr 09, 2007 7:47 am

Yeah... I think that's it for the noise.

It is based on frame rate so... it vibrates or changes on each frame.

Even if you could "slow it down" in another editor you wouldn't get a "smooth" jitter because it's going to be an abrupt change on what ever frame it gets expanded to. Vector noise isn't a smooth interpolation and would probably not look that good.

You might want to play with the noise interpolation of a key frame. It is pretty much the same but... it might have more control and you could change the interpolation of key frames so it isn't so extreme... like set it for "every other" key frame if you follow me. Haven't played with it much myself.

-vern

Genete · Post by **Genete** » Mon Apr 09, 2007 4:28 pm

Regarding to use of noisy keyframes you can check out my contest entry. I used it for the light gradient and for the match flame movements.
Good luck jhbmv007!!
Genete

jhbmw007 · Post by **jhbmw007** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 4:16 am

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I decided to animate a few "flames" with point motion, then duplicate them as needed. This was the only way I think I could have some of the flames jump off:

http://jhbmw007.ifastnet.com/sun2.mov