Fiction Posted on Computers Posted on Religion Posted on This book offers readers insight into the inner teachings of the elements, the forces behind the elements, and how they provide a framework for everything in the universe"-- Author : D.
Juvenile Fiction Posted on Author : Autumn M. Practical Celtic magic in the traditions of the Drulds. Know what the scene requires in every way before starting! But there are fundamentally sound ways to proceed that will give you the greatest chances of success. By far the most tried-andtrue technique for hand-drawn effects animation, is to roughly animate to begin with. Avoid thinking about the details of your effect until the overall motion is working well.
Draw with a loose hand, think of the energy rather than the design, and push your drawings dynamically as if they were actually moving on your page. There are several things to always consider when you are animating a splash. What is causing the splash is one of the most important. That factor alone will have a lot to do with how much water will be displaced, how high the splash will shoot up before it succumbs to gravity, and how big its secondary splash will be. Always remember to think about what else is going on in the scene.
Is the effect important to the telling of the story? Is there another action going on in the scene that is more important? This creates yet another set of ripples which overtake the ripples already created by the initial splash.
Understanding displacement, how a water surface always displaces itself as it moves from place to place is extremely important. Imagine tubular Surfer A : Paddles over the top of the wave.
LIQUIDS shapes of energy moving just under the surface of the water, which displace the surface textures as they roll underneath, allowing the details to fall back into their original place as they pass.
The simplest way to illustrate this is the image of a tiny boat, bobbing up and down and to and fro as a wave passes under it, but winding up in the exact same place it was after the wave has passed. Remember to keep your drawings as simple as possible, at least until the initial ruff animation is working LIQUIDS Note that Surfer A simply rolled around in a circle as the wave passed underneath him.
He ends up in almost precisely the same spot he started in. If you follow his movement through this sequence of drawings, you see the classical rolling wave physics at work!
Then we can add details, and add the overlapping actions of different sized waves. It is extremely important with good effects design, to vary the size and shapes of our waves and their surface details—and their movement as well—to create believable, natural feeling water animation. Remember also, to always push your drawings.
Always exaggerate, as animation needs that extra information to work well! These drawings are key poses about eight frames or one-third of a second apart. This entire sequence would last roughly 2. The main direction of these waves is from left to right. Imagine it is traveling from left to right, and wave peak B is sliding down the back of wave A in the opposite direction, from right to left. This action can be seen clearly in pose 2.
The larger waves might be big rolling swells that may have been created by a storm a thousand miles away, while the smaller counter-acting LIQUIDS waves could be a smaller, choppy type of wave caused by a local breeze.
In pose 3, we see wave B and wave C converging on each other, moving in opposite directions and building up into a larger wave, as wave A rolls away to the right, with much smaller waves D and X rolling down its back much as wave B did.
In pose 4, waves B and C have crossed over each other, with the much larger wave C pushing right through 3 4 wave B, building momentum as it goes. The smaller waves D and X are still moving right to left against the larger waves, and wave A is rolling right out of frame right. If we push it down on one side, it must rise on the other side. All the smaller secondary waves, D and X and another unnamed ripple, are moving counter to the main wave, now moving toward the left, up the face of wave C as it rolls to the right.
In pose 6, we see waves C and D converging, while wave X has been absorbed completely, and the 5 6 unnamed ripple gets pushed back and away from us as C and D converge. Behind wave peak C, I have reintroduced secondary wave B, as the original wave B continues of screen left. This is where this wave action begins to hook up with the original action in pose 1, so that it can be cycled over and over.
In pose 7 we see wave C and D continue to converge and build up, approaching the size and weight of wave peak A from pose 1. The smaller secondary wave B is starting its way back down the backside of the larger more powerful wave. If you look back at pose 1 now and imagine it is the next pose, you can see how A continues its way left to right, as wave B slides down its back. This is a very stylized approach to animating wave action, with larger swells pushing against the smaller 7 8 secondary chop moving in the opposite direction.
The smaller waves in the foreground demonstrate the same type of wave action, and if you analyze these actions, there are some very useful techniques and tricks for successfully animating waves.
Always keep overlapping counteraction and volume displacement in mind when you are animating a water surface. They can take on an incredible variety of shapes, and they stretch and squash delightfully. When animating bubbles, remember to exaggerate the stretch and squash, and have fun with them! Here is a more detailed look at what happens underneath the water, as the object punches a pocket of air into the water.
Then as gravity continues to pull the object down, the air begins its wiggling journey back to the surface breaking up into smaller pieces in the process. This photo above was taken with a very fast shutter speed, so there is no motion blur whatsoever. When designing a hand-drawn waterfall, we should add a certain amount of directional energy and motion blur, which not only helps to simplify the animation process, but can also add the all-important energy which I emphasize so much as an integral part of all effects animation.
To consider animating each little droplet and water shape as it descends is out of the question. Some of the details can be followed through, but it is not necessary to animate all of them! Keep it as simple as possible! When deciding which details to focus your efforts on, choose the parts of the effects design that make the strongest silhouette. Choose your battles carefully, and you will save much time and your effects will be more powerful.
I must emphasize once again, that waterfalls are one effects element that can be beautifully done digitally, even in a 2D environment, so considering their inherent complexity, animating them by hand is not always the best way to go!
In the course of my career as an effects animator I have had to animate alcohol, oil, salad dressing, mucus, lava, mud, blood, gasoline, milk, oatmeal, and other liquids, and I handled every one slightly differently. Most important is to establish the viscosity, or thickness of the liquid we are attempting to animate.
The higher the viscosity, the thicker the liquid. Suppose water is our standard for average viscosity as it is the most commonly animated liquid. If we are animating motor oil, or cooking oil, which has a far greater viscosity than water, our shapes need to be more blobby and rounded, and our animation has to be somewhat slower as well.
Greater viscosity means the molecules of the substance cling together more stubbornly, thus it is thicker and moves more slowly. These liquids will displace themselves more quickly and break up into beads much more easily than water. On the slightly thicker, higher viscosity side, something like milk, which is only slightly thicker than water will displace and break up slightly slower than water. Thicker still are all types of oils, thicker even more are mud, lava, tar, molasses, etc.
If we are animating gasoline, paint thinner, or kerosene, the opposite principles apply, as these liquids have less viscosity, and therefore are thinner and break up more easily than water.
So keeping that in mind, gasoline will break up into thin sheets and tiny droplets much quicker than water does. In a puddle it would spread much faster as well. Research and observation are very important when tackling these liquid elements. If we are animating lava, which has a far greater viscosity than water, oil or gasoline, our shapes need to be even more blobby and rounded than our oil, and our animation has to be slower although it depends on how quickly lava is being ejected from a volcanoe, it can be moving very fast.
Lava is very challenging to animate, as it is usually cooling quickly, and the cooler lava is thicker, therefore we need to deal with different viscosities at the same time. As this lava is thrust upward, it is also spreading and rotating as it stretches and breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces. In the illustrations on the following pages, I have found the essential energetic design of this spewing lava and drawn it clearly. It is the cosmic design behind everything.
Spectacular lava fountain, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. As it spews upwards, it also fans out and away from its source, a direct result of the pressure below, being released into the air above.
It is like a blossom opening up! Pure energy unleashed. This kind of grid can help us to see the structure that every little droplet and detail of the lava is attached to as it spews, seemingly into abstract shapes, up and out of the volcano below. I have drawn it with very clear elliptical shapes in order to point out a very important aspect of special effects design.
Frequently I see attempts to draw this sort of effect, having a very unorganized and nonenergetic feel to them, and that is because they are missing this all important principle. These shapes and lines may appear to the untrained eye to be mostly abstract in nature, but they are in fact extremely structured. Play when you get the chance! When animating mud, the viscosity is somewhere in-between that of oil and lava, and like lava, the viscosity can vary depending on the temperature or water content of the mud.
As mud dries it may become brittle and form chunks and strangely shaped blobs. Well, if we want our water to look and feel really fantastic, understanding what makes water animation look great from a hands-on approach can help us create far better CGI water effects.
Using what we know about strong classical design, we always strive for striking silhouettes in our animation, an absence of repetitive shapes, or too much symmetry, and in our action we also strive to overlap and offset our timing as much as possible, exaggerating these principles to make our animation more dynamic and alive.
This approach to animating water digitally, can immediately set our work a cut above the rest. This is particularly important in the world of CGI cartoons. The answer is an emphatic no! The majority of 3D programs have preset effects simulations, which we can of course alter and manipulate in a variety of ways. Whether it is an undulating water surface, or an enormous splash that we are animating, if we approach our computer with the knowledge that natural elemental energies contain within them a great deal of randomness and chaos, we can, with patience and technical know-how, imbue our digital effects with that fantastic aliveness that sets great effects animation apart!
Can we not, armed with our imaginations and the knowledge of the elemental magic at work in the universe, add something to our computer animation that will honor the art form, and bring it to a higher level of artistry? Effects artists there are able to create dynamic shapes with their 3D effects rigs, and to manipulate the effects manually to give them more life. LIQUIDS It is through innovative and creative application of the classical principles that have always made animation such a magical art form, that we can always improve on the new effects we create and carry on the legacy of animation greatness.
Try this someday. Just sit down by a pond or a lake or the ocean, and pay attention to the way the shapes undulate and morph into each other wildly and unpredictably.
Find a few stones and throw them into the water, and observe the shapes of the splashes they create. Although each splash may resemble the next, each is more different than we can possibly imagine. There is an entire universe of uniqueness and natural perfection in every drop, every bubble, every ripple, every wave. Water reacts to every force exerted upon it, with the absolutely perfect defense mechanism of displacement. If you push it here, it expands over there. If you rob it of its space, it seeps into the adjacent one.
If you scream at it, it absorbs your sound waves. If you thrash at it wildly, it just moves out of the way and regroups elsewhere. To attempt to know it, and capture the magic of its movement, has been a lifelong learning experience for me. And it will continue to be. As was discovered when conducting experiments in zero gravity aboard a space shuttle. Anything goes, as long as the energy is in the drawing! Its shape is a simple tapering affair, fatter at the base and tapering off to a dull point.
In a sheltered setting, with little or no wind, its movement will be a subtle stretching and squashing. There should be a slowing-in cushion as it reaches its highest and lowest points, with the drawings being much closer together.
The lighter part of the drawing is the subsequent position, to illustrate the movement more clearly. It is one of the greatest ways to observe and keep engaged with the effects learning experience. It becomes slightly more violent and reactionary to the outside forces. Remember, exaggeration is our friend, and it makes our animation more punchy and believable! On the second pass, the primary interior shapes can be conceived as sections of spherical masses moving upwards, which then diminish in size.
We build the silhouette with sharper edges, connecting these spherical masses. These quickly unite into larger silhouettes, depending on the severity and frequency of the forces wind, gravity, pressure and the amount of available fuel from the material that has been ignited paper, straw, wood, gasoline, etc. Hot air rises from a fuel source, drawing in cooler air in from the bottom. It begins to arc. I have never found a better explanation!
I have started with basic triangles—note that they are different sizes. Opposing arcs become very apparent at this stage, and are an outstanding feature of almost all good, elemental effects design. Larger pieces may last longer. Be careful not to make these negative spaces too water-like! Keep the shapes working with the overall design. This is a way that we actually mark up our production effects drawings, so that our assistant effects artists can tell the holes from the interior shapes.
This is common when animating water and smoke as well. As with all special effects, start out with the most basic shapes as in this example on the left. With time and practice, an effects artist intuitively feels this underlying structure within every drawing he or she creates.
This is a very key point to understanding and drawing all effects animation—as I emphasized so emphatically in Chapter 2! Understand the energy behind the effect, and stick to it with every stroke of the pencil.
We should also be aware of the spacing of these elements, and course, vary their sizes. Intense heat can be suggested off screen by adding a warp and turbulence to a character, as well as a strong rim light. Here is an example of a jet engine causing some heat turbulence.
Of course the house would also be reduced to ashes in pretty short order! This illustrates perfectly the fractal nature of all pure elemental energy. Whether at the macro- or microcosmic level, the same patterns are apparent. The life span of such smoke is determined by its density, which in turn is determined by the type of fuel being ignited. Ah, the abhorrent cigarette smoke, so often associated with evil, especially these days!
It is fun drawing and animating linear smoke like this, and there is an interesting combination of the smoke reacting to the subtle air currents as it rises, as well as the movement of the cigarette. Cruella De Vil is an excellent example, with her nauseating and intrinsically evil green cigarette smoke writhing and curling menacingly. This is a clear case, too, of an effect integrating into the psychology of a character.
All of his effects elements reinforce his paths of action, as well as his emotional state. Again, her psychology is more graceful and mannered, and as such, so are the smoke shapes she generates by moving the wick. Remember, smoke is just particles of matter drifting in the air, and reacting to the air currents or the movement or intensity of its energy source.
I have numbered each drawing with the actual frame numbers, and this sequence would represent 74 frames, or just over two seconds of animation. This ball continually expands as it rises as smoke will in relatively calm air with a hot source pushing it upward, and cooler air above slowing it down and pushing it outward.
Variations of this simple approach can be combined with a far more complex smoke design as well, but this is a great little exercise to get a good feeling for how a simple column of smoke can be simply but well animated. This force is initially very straightforward, traveling directly outward from the fuel source, but as an explosion expands it becomes prone to secondary forces like wind, obstacles, or secondary explosions.
On the left is an explosive blast of smoke, as if shooting from a volcano. On the right is a whispy, more delicate style of smoke, like we might see coming from a cigarette or stick of incense.
With persistence, hard work, and lots of drawing, we can translate this reference material and our understanding of it, into beautiful special effects animation.
As with the notion of turbulence and warp to indicate distortion, steam initially behaves the same way, eventually morphing into more discernible cloud-like shapes. If steam is being generated by a teakettle, there will be very little tonal variety within the silhouettes.
However, once we get to the steam created by a nuclear power plant, it is virtually indiscernible from large-scale smoke except the color is white. This illustration that I created in Chapter 3, could be smoke, could be steam, or both. In an actual scenario like this, there would probably be a great deal of smoke and steam at the same time. The steam would dissipate and disappear much faster than the smoke.
The smoke would continue to rise and spread out into the air above. We must be vigilant in small-scale smoke to keep these shapes from looking like popcorn, where the shapes are uniform in size, design, and spacing. Bilateral symmetry is the kiss of death in organic effects. If you can draw a line bisecting a path of steam or smoke into two similar halves, you are approaching the Rorschach inkblot test phenomenon.
Try varying the primary path of action so that it makes the direction less straight-up-and-down. The smoke on the ground will also slow in very quickly, but it will retain its mass longer than the stream of smoke. The contrast between the two overlapping smoke reactions creates visual interest. In both instances, there will be overlapping smoke shapes that morph into one another. In the upper left-hand corner, you can see the subtle wave action lines in the drawing.
As the heat begins to subside, the smoke slows down, reacting to the cooler air it is running into. The warm and cool air colliding will cause the smoke to meander and twist slightly at this point. As it rises further, it spreads out, moving slower and slower. The cool air above forces the smoke back on itself, creating a slow rolling effect as the smoke being pushed down gets sucked back into the rising warm air once again. It is a beautiful movement to see when we are watching real smoke, and if animated well, it is also a thing of beauty!
This means it will be affected by the same forces of hot and cool air, wind and gravity. A nuclear blast comes to mind. Think about it—there is a strong directional force moving upward, which causes a reversed series of explosive plumes on the ground. The only difference is that a nuclear explosion then hits a ceiling of cooler air as it rises, which makes it roll out into that iconic mushroom shape.
The internal rolling of such a massive blast is exceedingly violent, yet the movement is still extremely slow. A volcanic eruption is very similar, with enormous amounts of internal overlapping shapes rolling into themselves as the overall mass gains volume. Elegant forms of pure energy. Explosions can be caused by any sort of pressure building up within a space that can no longer contain that pressure, such as steam pressure building up in a pressure cooker, or a river swollen with rainfall pressuring a dam.
Explosions can be full of liquid, gases, or any variety of natural or man-made elements. The initial action is an extremely abrupt outward burst of energy from the source of the explosion, which then collides with the resistance of its surroundings—be it air, water, or objects with which it collides. But did you know that the psychic energies of each Element are found within each and every person on the planet? Or that by connecting spiritually with a particular Element you can help address an imbalance in your life?
Elemental Magic was created for both beginners and more experienced Witches alike. In this guide, best-selling author Lisa Chamberlain covers it all: the basics of incorporating the Elements into your rituals, as well as less-often discussed topics like animism, Elemental personalities, and using these forces of nature to help you enhance your magical perception. Indeed, as you will see, an Element-centered practice is a rich and rewarding way to deepen your connection to the Goddess and God, to Nature, the Universe, or whatever terms your particular belief system ascribes to the power of All That Is.
In Practical Elemental Magick the authors provide an unprecedented combination of research and techniques for working the magick of Air, Fire, Water and Earth, as well as the spiritual creatures associated with each - the Elemental Gods, The novels in this series are loosely based on classic fairy tales, and take place in a fantasy version of turn-of-the-century London, where magic is real and Elemental Masters control the powers of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.
I invite you to take a look at the examples of me animating pixie dust in real time on the Elemental Magic II website, as well as many other clips of wellexecuted magic effects animation.
This is where the true value of this volume will This is called laid air. The air is known to have different spiritual qualities at different times of day, too.
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