At the moment I have to do an effect for my game of a lightning force field.
Now drawing these in a paint program would be very difficult, but there are loads of gif tools that can help with the making of sprites, these things can make interesting effects with a few clicks, like fire lightning explosions rippling water, etc, a bit like those filters one gets for photoshop that make ice, fire and what have you effects only I want them animated
Now I had a link to a great program that could do these kind of novelty effects for giff animations with just a few mouse clicks, but just as I need it, I cant find the thing, so here I am looking for a tool that will help me.
Whats available, have any clickers seen any good tools to make little animation effects for us?
Try downloading the demo of Cinema4D from www.maxon.net
It's a 3d modelling and animation app, but I think it has some nifty shaders by default, and it's great for animation.
You can create cool particle effects too.
The demo version displays a post-render logo slap-bang in the centre of your image so that people don't just use the demo all the time. So to avoid this, set the perspective in your scene to top-down/dimetric/isometric (one of the three), and set the image size to something huge like 2000x2000. The logo will appear dead centre, so this forces the logo to appear at about 1000x1000 in the image. Leaving you a thousand pixels to work with before you encounter the logo.
Then pop the image you're working on somewhere in the 1000x1000 pixels that don't have the logo in them.
When you're done rendering the frames for your animation, you can just crop them all down.
Although it's 3d, the shaders can pull off some awesome warps and blends. You can generate some great boiling water effects.
This is good as well for particles, its a particle engine that exports out as graphic images, they do a lite version so one can use for free but with limitations
Cool. I had a great use for it once, in a game where you could hit your enemies and you'd get a series of big cartoony "WACK!", "BANG!", "POW!" bubbles with the impact. They were animated to look really cartoony.
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