Yeah that would really help.Id like to see an Aura Tutorial aswell.

Well the glow thing was very interesting (thanks for that)
I meant more along the lines of an energy aura, how to make different types, and how to animate them.

As monkey stated, you can't see wind. You however can see what the wind moves.

Take leaves for example. A gust of wind could move them around in a tornado shaped path.

If you're trying to make something from a show, could you possibly post a screen shot of what ever you're trying to mimic?

Okay, by wind effects, lets say a tornado. How would you make one of those? Yes i know the dirt and dark clouds it whirls around is what makes them visible.

Yes that works. wind and dust effects like that. I would like to know how to do that, mainly how to animate it.

Pandora'sSecret wrote:

here are two clear pictures of what i kind of want to icon.

Well, ok:
This is a bit rough and definitely unfinished (in terms of the art), but hopefully it will help.

So, with wind (specifically how wind is drawn in anime), you're gonna use some visual clues in order to see what is normally (even at high speed) invisible. They've built up kind of a vocabulary with their visual style (anime), so if you can get this down (better than I have), you cna probably jump around inside the anime genre. You could do things like the naruto thinger you've got pictured, general mood wind (like the closing of an episode where your guy is standing on the hill looking pensive and thoughtful because he hates killing but he'll hafta kill again because this is what life dealt him and there's no way out now and doesn't that suck) kinda deal, or for the big bad fart from your 5 story tall tengu who just had edamame. IOW, it should work in multiple situations depending on what you need and how you pull it off.

In general, wind is white (for pure air at least), with touches of blue or gray. It's transparent, meaning you can make out what's behind it, but only semi-transparent (everything you can see through the wind is white washed). When close to the ground or moving over the ground, it can pick up brown and represent dust. It often makes the fancy hair and clothes of anime chars move in heart-stirring ways (another visual clue).

In this lil' tut, I'll ignore the hair and clothes factor and just concentrate on the atmosphere (the white and brown bits that indicate a wind's speed, direction, and form). You can think of those bits of moving color as small clouds (of either dust or air) and we'll use these and their positions and size as the focus of the animation.

So, Dinner, you'd like to get some help with what looks like a horizontal tornado coming from a paper fan. I'll stick with the perspective of the photo you posted from Naruto(?). We're looking at the figure and the 'nado from the side, pretty much at the same level. The tornado is coming at us, but heading mainly to our right. I won't do the figure, but I will start with the fan.



That's five(?) frames there at 1 10th of a second each, just moving the fan up while facing it's edge. I did it in full green as a sort of basic sketch to be detailed and shaded later. Right now, I'm concentrating on the motion over time.

I imagined it moving up (a move I've seen Geisha and No players perform) and that it would start the nado as the fan moved up. I also imagined it having a sort of fade out period, too.



The major wind clouds are done first in red. Like I said, I'm worried mainly about motion here, and detailing and rendering can come later AFTER I have everything where I want it. The clouds (or the larger clouds) are the concentrations of dust or air that the viewer's eye will be able to pick out as they move. We need to have concentrations (the nodes), that are distinguishable from the whole cone shape of the tornado or no motion will be detectable. Here's all the frames side by side:



(19 frames. Move right to left, top to bottom like text)
Now, I've picked out two clouds and put cyan and white dots on them. Follow the first cyan dot from frame to frame. It moves in a spiral (clockwise) and ALSO out from the fan (or I hope it does :D). The second white dot does the same. Both spirals that thy follow start small and increase in size as they move out. There are, needless to say, many other clouds in the animation as well. They give the brain the visual clues that the motion is in a spiral cone shape and help to define the speed (the distance each cloud travels in the spiral between frames), the direction (each cloud is moving towards us in a clockwise spiral), and shape (the circles each cloud moves in forms a cone) of the overall wind element (shown in the last section).

While you're making something like this, move between frames, back and forth, A LOT. Concentrate on the motion and making it smooth and fluid.

So, that's fine, you think, but I didn't want red wind...
Ok, so here's phase 2: We take the rough sketch and, after making a color ramp of say 4 colors, we go back over the red. First, we'll use a color replacer to change the red to our brightest hue on the ramp (this will be both our 'lead' (densest part of the cloud) color and our outline color). Then, frame by frame we work down the color ramp, filling in the originally red outlines as if they were clouds (I was especially sketchy with this step, but hope fully it makes the point).



Now, don't make the mistake here that we're coloring the clouds. We're not. We're making transparencies. With 4.0, we can use alpha channels and transparent colors as part of the icon. So, these won't be colors, as much as they'll be densities of air. These densities will, when we're done coloring, be replaced (in the 4.0 icon editor or something like the GIMP or photoshop) with different opacity levels of the same color.



So, ideally (and I'll leave it to you to do this last step), you'd end up with a wind effect you can overlay over any other tile or sprite and still have it look pretty good!.

Anyway, that's how I might do it.
Hope that helped

Maggeh wrote:

Hehe, I tried explaining this LG10 a few weeks ago on the spot with a very very bad sketch done in paint with Arrows pointing the directions he would want the wind to move (he wanted something slightly different and less straight forward though).

Meh, I think you did a much better job than me and I shall have to get him to look at this right away.

Sounds like you got the idea, tho. It took me a while to figure it out (if I did). I hope I explained it well enough but I probably could have gone more into the opacity thing (with an example).

I think you got as close as anyone is going to get to it. I mean it was a really specific type of animation, which is what really was the difficult thing about it, animation.

I suppose what people will be asking about after the shadowing/shading tuts get done is animation.

I now regret even more not taking those weekend courses on animation at Temple last year now, I probably could have posted all the stuff I got and learned for people to read easily.

Well the reason I not taking the course right now is because last year I was still in high school (and had a much more flexible schedule), and that I had pretty much a free ticket to the course. My teacher had given me a 300$ AP student scholarship (along with 2 other people, and I think one of them have to drop the whole dealio too), but things came up and it fell through.

Ugh the more I think about it, the more it makes me feel bad about not doing it, because my teacher could have given the scholarship to someone else. And now I don't have the time to do anything like that.

Id go with a whitish gray pulsating "beam" of wind that is almost fully transparent (therefore having the clear color as in that picture) and implement slightly lighter waves/lines of the same, or a similar color, with less transparency. Id have the less transparent lines flow through the main gust to show movement. In addition, id probably animate dirt particles being kicked to the side around the gust of wind.

Id probably have to do it myself to better explain it, but thats how i imagine it should work.