Quick Fire Animation ｜ How to Animate a 2D Flame)

This video is brought to you by Squarespace, the best place to easily build a website, portfolio and online store. An all-in-one platform to give you the best design to showcase your work. In this video, I'm going to show you how to animate a flame and then create this burnt effect by actually setting the frames on fire. I'm going to animate this flame frame by frame in Photoshop. You can use any frame by frame software you like, it won't matter at all. I use the free plugin AnimDesign 2, which you can find the link for in the description, which adds this toolbar with useful animation features. Many things in nature animate in a wave pattern, animating in an S shape. Hair in the wind, smoke, obviously waves and fire. So I find it really useful to start with a wave animation as a reference. In a new document, we're going to create a layer as a guide and draw a cross where we want the base of our flame to stay and stretch that out to about 12 frames. We're working in 24 frames per second and each frame will be two frames long, so we're animating on twos. On a new layer, we're going to draw a rough sine wave, which looks like this, and align that to the center. And I'm going to drag it to the bottom just a bit as well and make that just a touch narrower. Now I'm going to duplicate this frame and drag it up a touch. And I've got my onion skins on so I can see a faded view of our previous frame. And I'm going to make another duplicate and move that up the same distance again and keep doing that for a few more frames or until this sort of hump lines up with this hump here and our wave will loop. There we've got our wave looping over seven frames. And even though it's only moving up in a straight line, you can kind of see the waving back and forth and kind of understand how a flame is going to attach to this. So let's make a new layer and start drawing our flame. We're going to use this part of the wave as a guide for our flame motion. So let's imagine that this wave is kind of like the spine of our flame and we've got a certain amount of mass that we need to have on either side of it. Let's add that before tapering out at the top. The base of our flame needs to stay reasonably static between all of these frames because the base of the flame is going to be closer to the fuel of the fire and will take less influence from the cooling air temperature which causes this wave motion at the top. Let's actually go back onto our guide layer and note down a few of these shapes so that they don't differ too much in the subsequent frames. Let's mark the top of the flame here as well. Back on our flame layer, let's add a new layer and we're going to continue to use that wave motion as a guide and push our flame more in that direction. So we can see over here it's a lot higher on the left side and then on the right side it's going a bit lower. So let's try to match that up with our circle reference at the bottom of the flame as well. Let's continue that process on the next layer, making sure that each frame feels like it has as much volume within the flame as the previous frames. And then let's repeat that process for the last four frames too. And now we have something looking like this. So the flame movement is looking good to me but overall I think I want the flame to have a bit more movement and be a little bit larger. So I'm going to use this as a small section of my flame and I'm going to draw a larger flame over the top. A bit like that on a new layer so the flame now has two segments that I can separate later and have them as different colors. If you want a smaller flame you could always make a second section inside this one so that you have two segments of your flame that way if you want two segments at all. So I'm going to make the top of this flame section about here and I'm going to continue to follow this wave as a guide for this top section here and then just slowly fill in the mass till it lines up at the bottom using the same principles as that first flame and then continue that for the rest of the layers. And this is what we end up with. Now this flame is moving a little too fast for me. I want to have a more slow and graceful motion because when we actually go in to burn the edges it's going to get a lot more chaotic. So what I'm going to do is create an empty frame in between all of these frames to make the motion last twice as long. Let's hide our wave layer because we won't need this anymore and you can see that every other flame which is blue down here in our timeline is blank. So when we play it it'll have a strobing effect but the speed is looking a lot more like we want. I'm also going to duplicate the very first frame and put that towards the end. We're not going to render that but we're going to need to use that as a guide for our onion skins when we want to draw the last frame. Because the process what we're going to do now is turn on our onion skins and we're going to do that by just drawing in between the lines of our onion skins we showed the before and after frame. And there's not much thinking going on during this process at all. Drawing a flame from scratch can be a bit intimidating especially if you haven't had much practice. That's why I like to break down my animations into simple movements starting with the wave which is really easy to animate then slowly building the complexity on step by step on top of that. Here is the finished animation and you can see all the blue frames are the in-betweens that we've just added and I'm pretty happy with that speed. Now let's set it on fire. First a quick word from this video's sponsor Squarespace. I've used Squarespace for years and they're the perfect platform to show off your art and animation to potential clients. I get most of my inquiries for paid work that turn into actual bookings through my Squarespace website via my contact form and you get full access to analytics as well. I'm a huge fan of analyzing your data to make changes based on that to enhance your presence online and bring you more work and especially more work from the types of clients that you want. And the SEO tools are really easy to use. You've got all the abilities to rank where you want to on and other search engines. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com forward slash ben marriott save 10% off your first website or domain. On a new layer I'm going to number my frames so I don't get them mixed up when they're all printed out and add another new layer that stretches across the whole animation and add some alignment markers as well so that way I can easily align the frames when they're brought back into the computer. And now I'm going to save out every frame as an image by going up to file export render video and saving as a photoshop image sequence. I'm just going to choose jpegs. And now I've got 14 images ready to print out. I cut out the rough shape of the flame with a craft knife leaving enough space to burn in the edges. I got some different burning tools. The grill lighter had the best control so I stuck with that one igniting each edge and smothering it out with paper towel as I got closer to our line. It took a few attempts on a test frame to get a consistent technique down so there wasn't much overshooting the line. I did that around all the edges and then I moved it over to a desk with some white card and photographed it from the top. I did this rather than scanning it because I figured that the scanner bed would squish out a lot of the depth that the edges had and I'd lose a lot of that burned crispy texture and also I didn't want my printer covered in ash. I also photographed it on a piece of textured yellow card because I thought that might have an interesting look that I could easily color select and adjust the inside color once I took that back into After Effects and I did that for all 14 frames. Once I had them into the computer I imported them into After Effects aligning the guides each other just using the rotation and scale properties. Here's what it looked like over the white background and here's what it looked like over the yellow one and I honestly wasn't quite as stoked as I would have liked with the results. The burnt texture just wasn't quite obvious to me. Maybe I should have spent more time smoking the edges first and there was a lot of variance as well in the paper where it had kind of warped with the heat. Now scanning this probably would have solved that but then I would have lost even more of that burnt texture at the edges. I tried overall a few variations and I think this inverted one works the best for me. I really like how the specks of ash kind of look like film damage. So after finishing the rough animation printing burning and aligning them in After Effects probably took an extra two to three hours which certainly isn't quick but I think we do get a result that's pretty unique and more interesting to look at. I also really enjoy being able to take digital art out of the computer on occasion and to recreate this look digitally would take in a fair bit longer. So a worthwhile experiment I think. Maybe. Let me know down in the comments. I've made a short playlist of some related videos that I think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far. I'll see you in the next video and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week.