It's sometimes tricky to create a smooth animation, but as smooth animations are totally our thing, we're ready to put in as much effort as it takes to create something truly magical (pun intended). To animate the bellows was one of such cases.
Bellows is one of the key laboratory gear items: you just can't create a potion without heating some coals with them, that's why we put so much focus and effort into them so it would be nice and handy to use.
We always aspire to make smooth animations. With the bellows, it was important to come out with a way to animate them so that with any speed of compression it looked good. At first, we tried to draw frame by frame, but this appeared too visually jarring and intense.
We increased the number of frames up to 65, but that didn't help either – the tremor was still too visible.
Almost all art in Potion Craft is executed in raster, but this time it seemed that just wouldn’t cut it, so we made the left bellows edge a vector line and animated it.
All that was left to do was to apply some filters to make it look rougher and voilà! The case was solved!
To achieve desired smoothness we rendered this animation in 130 frames with the angle changing for 0,16° per frame. Now next time you are firing up your coals you will know the story behind all the trial, error, and subsequent visual tricks used to create such a simple looking and smooth animation!
We'll also tell about sparks in some of the subsequent devlogs, so
Stay tuned
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