I'm trying to improve my skillset. Here is my first stab at an animated fire. It looks OK, but not great. I could use some pointers.







Edit: Turns out the gif export distorted the original image: Here's the individual frames unadulterated.



thanks,

bkeegan

I made this in about 30-45 minutes. I did this just for kicks but I would appreciate any c&c.

The palette is a little sloppy. I used 31 colors, probably could trim it down if I wanted to.
I'm less than excited with the lasers.

Yes, it will be eventually animated. I wanted to nail the shape/shading first before I went thru animating it. I actually did a few frames but then I ended up resizing the teeth so I'll have to redo that.
The old teeth were wider and I estimated with that I could get a smooth animation in about 4-5 frames so I think this might take 5-6 frames. I suppose I could do a "classic" animation in about 2 frames =p

I tried to keep the number of colors down but I ended up getting some nasty color banding. This one has a total of 13 colors.

Yeah I was shooting for a sort of rounded top. I don't have a reference photo as I was working from imagination.

Oh and this one I did on my brand new monitor. I definitely noticed a lot more when I was looking at some of my previous work. My old monitor was a 7 year old CRT =p

Just paint with one color on the other color with 50% opacity - voila - instant happy

Jad, yeah I was working on a piece today and that's what I ended up doing. It was actually faster than trying to use the pre-anti-aliased line too (and cleaner!)

Although I think in some instances you can add some visual interest by manually choosing your color... particularly when gray is involved.

Kinda makes the edge look sharp and crisp as opposed to a bit fuzzy.


I once read something about sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but it only works with lcd monitors. Apparently it feeds of the color and location of subpixels. You guys heard anything about that?

Mathias,

Yeah, it's cool though. Just shrugging it off and moving on.

I am using Paint.net which I am quite pleased with. I've tried other applications like promotion, graphics gale and grafx2 but I just don't like their interfaces. I like paint.net for the way the controls work more than anything else. (I did like grafx2's splitscreen zoom/normal view but I couldn't get over the lack of standard Windows undo/redo/cut/copy/paste controls)

I don't press a button and my entire image is AAed. I personally think the line tool in paint.net is stellar. When you draw a line it creates 4 drag points and you can move those around to shape the line as you see fit. What I do is create a layer and use this line tool. It does require carefully shaping and do I have to tweak the pixels afterwords. The aa line tool in paint.net creates semi-transparent pixels so technically it doesn't add new colors, just varying alpha levels of the color you picked. I suppose the new colors are created when the semi-transparent pixels are merged with whatever it happens to be in front of. I suppose it does automatically set the alpha level. I think that you'd have to use semi-transparent pixels if you wanted AA on anything that would be be placed in front a variable/dynamic background.

When I say that I do it on a separate layer so not to 'muck up' the original image is because I like to modularize my data and the layers allows me to manipulate the AA information separately.