The Start

So I'm planning on doing a small personal project that will enable me to try out various cool FX. I'm thinking smoke trails/jet engines/speed lines and throwing in some cool laser stuff too!

Creating a nice sequence is gonna be tough, its been a while since I boarded!

From the thumbs below I hope you can guess its gonna be about a ship of some kind! let me know which one you prefer :)

Impact dust sketch

Just a quick impact dust sketch. It's been nice trying to play with the different shapes in the design.

Smoke designs

Here are some smoke designs I've been working on. There's a few different smoke/dust impacts and dissapation ideas.  Its nice to design some single frames :)

Sketching again

So the weather hasn't been too bad here in London recently, it's been cold and rainy for a long time and now its not as cold and doesn't rain constantly! It's nice to finally get out and do some sketching around town. I've been getting some good tips from Gill regarding shapes and construction and its starting to sink in, a little anyway :)

Explosion designs

Felt inspired after seeing Chris Graf's explosion designs. So doodled out some designs of my own.

You're Fired!

This was a really cool animation to do! I was shown an awesome character design by 2DBean and thought, that would be really fun to animate! So I got in contact with Mr 2D B and got the go ahead to animate his wicked design.

I've been practising fire recently and wanted to continue this focus for this exercise so I decided to not animate the smoke. I had to simplify the design so I could animate it, which looking back at it now I wish I had kept it as detailed and just worked longer at it!

here is the original design by 2DBean:

and here it is animated:

You're Fired from Matt Timms on Vimeo.

I also put together a small progression vid of some of the stages, from rough through to comp:

You're Fired - animation progression from Matt Timms on Vimeo.

Torch Fire!!

Another collaboration with Gill! This time a great explorer design for some nice 2D torch fire animation. This was from another lesson on the 2D FX course on Bitey. It's a tricky element to animate, but it can be a lot of fun. I've been trying to think more about what's actually happening to the FX whilst animating recently, what's making it move compared to the technical aspects of arcs, spacing etc. So I was thinking this was an oily flame and it was getting pushed about a little by the wind. It would have been cool to animate the characters hair to help show the breeze and shadow layers etc but this exercise was to focus on the torch. Big shout out to Rufus for helping me with the comp, really helped to give it some heat.

 

Bitey 2D FX Torch from Matt Timms on Vimeo.