EDIT: changed my mind a bit about this explanation, a bit too much emphasis on being able to follow every speck of fire from bottom to top. making some edits :p
that is looking very good ryu!
yeah, fire is basically a wavy form which constantly has gusts of fuel coming from bottom to top, that then get torn to shreds which shrink more and more as they go towards the top. Those are the basics (unless it's a candle, if it's candle there's no shreds). You have good things going, your fire is wavy at the botton pointy at the top, you have sort gusts of fuel to the top where it separates and becomes little speckles that disappear.
if you want to make a cool memorable fire it's all about the ways you elaborate on that basic spewing motion, that's basically the only thing that separates different fire animations, just variations on the rythm, the stability and the shape, and the scale of the fire.
Try to start simple and make one or two bubbles of fuel that you can follow from bottom to top and become clear speckles when they start to detach from the fire.
Once you have that try enlarging one side of the flame you think will make it look more interesting, it should always be a little asymetric and unstable, how unstable is up to you. Fires with different origins, different scales and for different enviroments should have different characters.
You basically always have gusts of fuel coming from the bottom that get sort of torn into shreds as they start to detach from the body. You can just have something more candle like where the main body doesnt really get shredded, it just spews up little specks of fire, or you can shred the main
body to make those speckles at the top.
Small fires, candles basically just have the main body and the gusts of fuel, sometimes so little they only change height a little. The bigger it gets usually the bigger, more asymetric and more unstable the gusts get, also when they get shredded they make for more and more specks the bigger they get, you could almost say a candle is just one speck. The totally huge fires are more like an explosion and the overall shape of the fire takes on much more emphasis than the specks it gets shredded into when it disappears.
But always make sure you dont just add some crazy looking shape and then remove it in the next frame, have continuity and try to have a reason for everythng you add.
[EDIT: Space reserved for the fire gifs is now filled :p]
AIGHT. These are some picks of most representative fires out of my collection over the years. Lots of stuff from KOF (King of Fire...Fighters :p), I've analyzed aeons ago but never made a writeup...so brace youeselves :p.
This one is a real fire giffed, that base was probably added in afterwards. I just put it here because it's remarkably well giffed and looped in a pixelart-ish size.
Since this one isnt hand drawn it just doesnt have the shredding thing going on at the top it doesnt work on anything but black. But I love the sort of velvety quality of the fire. This one makes you feel like the fire is composed of translucent shining seaths that get torn apart when they separate from the body at the top, and well that's what fire looks like most of the time, right?
Now this is a torch from Metal Slug.
I love it because it's a good deconstruction of that velvety quality of fire, does the same thing with clearer shapes and wanes back and forth gracefully
This one from KOF is a bit more of an abstract fire. fitting since it's magic purple fire.
See how the big focus is the botton part with waves of fuel alternating from side to side to make the fire dance from side to side? makes for a really beautiful sillouethe. The way the fire gets torn to shreds is also really beautiful but it isnt the focus, takes place in much smaller space.
PS:I think there's a lot of phtoshoppy tricks on this fire
if you look closely you can see it's basically 3 fire sillouethes with a gradient applied on top to make for the shading. I think SNK has been doing something like Indigo's PS indexed painting for yeaars
(btw Ptoing recently showed me that to some extent pro motion and those old pixel programs have done index painting-ish things anyway)
This enemy from Earth Worm Jim isnt even technically fire, still works really well as one.
This one's got really beautiful gusts of fuel that you can follow, and it gets decomposed in very well drawn specks of fire. I think there's two layers of fire going on here...an outer one that has the gusts of fuel and is the body of the spectre, and an inner one that is like rocket fire propulsing him, they're just overlaid without diferentiating them to make a subtle looking multi layer fire.
I called it thief fire slash, I think it's from one of the Capcom Dungeons n Dragons games
This one's sorta shabby, but it's a good show of what happens when fire moves (basically the point of origin is like the top and where the fire is now becomes the body) and how to do a fire that in it's first frame is a slash.
it's a bright white slash until it explodes into fire and sorta disappears, the part closest to the tip disappears last, but the disappearing of the fire isnt from the starting point to the bottom, all of the fire sort of disappears at the same time, except for the tip that disappears a bit slower.
Garou:Mark of the Wolves. Sort of a KOF spinoff. SNK fighters and their fire weilders.
This one's pretty interesting on it's own but I'll also talk a bit about how it's used ingame.
The source of the fire is the middle, but the source is sorta suffocated and escapes to the sides, since it's magical blue fire it gets away with weird stuff, so the way it escapes being suffocated is forming that energy arc, kinda like the aura effects on akuma and many anime characters.
That energy arc moves to the top and gets shredded like it usually happens with fire.
There's also two candle like flames on each side of the arc. The left one grows below the arc of fire, then when the arc gets shredded grows bigger than the arc and gets shredded itself. The right one remains at the base of the arc, only overpasses it a little bit before the arc gets shredded, it's basically just adding a tiny bit of eye candy.
The result is pretty mesmerizing IMO =)
Now you see how it's used ingame and why the source is sorta exhausted ( and also a stray fire frame popping in at the top right corner...ignore it I must've placed it aeons ago when I first broke down this fire =/ ), the source is the palm of his hands but he closed them, so it escapes to the sides
What's interesting to me is that the same fire gets two tweaked timings and has the beggining frames offset a little...and it almost convinces you it's two different fire animations for each hand ( I certainly thought so when I first saw this :p)
Kof again. some evil clone dude.
This one is just the best pixelart version I know of of fire actually burning something. in pixelart fire is often smokeless and doesnt actually visibly carbonize anything, also since it extends over the material it makes interesting waves of fire, looks pretty wild.
I edited this one to de-colorize the jacket he wears, it normally was the same color as the fire before it burnt. The beggining frames have a sort of energy ball almost exploding outwards, then they project downwards until on frame 10 they engulf all of his face and his arms, they also round the flaps of his coat, making a rim of fire.
At this point there is a *bit* of smoke coming out of his shoulder, and the flaps can be seen sorta carbonizing from inside. Those are the details I really love about this one.
From there to frame 13 the flame just engulfs everything and the clouds of smoke become a bit bigger, from there on the fire just loses the fuel (the fuckin coat disappeared! :p) and all of the fire very quickly gets sort of wiped away by small dark clouds of smoke. That ending is underwhelmingly un-smokey :p
KOF again. This is a super from the evil form of the respective envious sidekick, Iori. Think KOF's vegeta possesed by Magin Boo moment. This was mostly to show the more huge explosiony fires, where the general shape is more important than the single specks. I'm not getting into the geisery nature of this one :p
PS:sorry I havent commented in your other topic, but honestly I've been feeling like redrawing an animation too much before you've seen it in engine is a bit wasteful, you should just try to get them to a point where they're functional so that you're going forward and you can finish whole character movesets. You can always tweak once you've seen them acting in engine and the tweaks will likely be a lot more functional.
I think your character animations there are quite functional, remind me a lot of Star ocean Blue sphere, which is always good. if anything the female run looks a bit unclear, but it'll probably be fine
