Just thought Iâd share a little something that I worked on for the prequel infiltrate update. Itâs been a little while since the update came out and Makkonâs been showing of some of his contributions, so I think Iâll do the same.
Along with the fire and smoke particles on the burning torches, the 3 different rain tiles, the clouds/mist texture, the floating dust motes (wherever itâs dusty and thereâs dust dancing in beams of light) and the âpoofâ of dust when Katia lands in the cavern, Kazerad asked me if I could turn 3 static, painted frames into a smooth animation.
To begin with, I honestly thought he was joking as I thought that it was a ridiculous thing to ask. A smooth(ish) animated video out of 3 frames? How the hell was I going to do that? Well, it turns out that adobe after effects (the program that I use for this kind of thing) has this nifty feature where you can tell it to try to draw in new additional frames between the existing frames of any video you give it (essentially increasing the total number of frames, resulting in a smoother/longer animation). To begin with, I tried seeing how it fared adding in frames to video made of just the 3 original frames. It didnât look good. It didnât look good at all.
The way it tries to generate these new frames is by analyzing the pixel data of the two frames either side of what itâs trying to fill in and then drawing a sort of âmiddle groundâ between the two images. Having only frames of âeyeâs completely open, eyeâs closed and glowing, open eyes, the program made a bit of a garbled mess of the in-between frames, so I had to try something else.
Going back to photoshop (where I cut the original image up into the original 3 frame animation), I duplicated some of the layers, merged them together and used the liguify tool to roughly âsmudgeâ together some believable frames of blink animation between her eyes being fully open and fully closed.
I canât remember exactly how many new frames I created this way, but I suspect it was 4 in total. 2 additional âeyes closingâ frames and 2 for opening.
Assuming those numbers are somewhat accurate, that left me with 7 frames of animation for after effects to try to extrapolate a smooth animation from as opposed to only 3. Thankfully, while not an absolutely perfect result, it worked well enough.
From there, I just had to tinker with the timing of the frames to make the motion feel like it had some weight to it, add in a little bit of additional movement (that slight head dip and raise) and create a subtle blue âflashâ effect to help mask the transition of the ânormal colouredâ scene to the ânight vision colouredâ scene (also to try to give a bit of additional âpunchâ to the eyes opening).
There were actually numerous versions of this animation with some being flashier than others with more overt visual effects. At the end of the day though, Kazerad wanted something not too over the top, so we settled with the version you see before you.
Just bare in mind that this video version doesnât show the pauses before the animation and between the blink and disappearing as that was added by Kazerad by simply displaying specific frames in game for longer than the others to save file space.
So there you go. thatâs how a small part of the introduction to the flash that took nearly two years to complete was made.
Oh, and one final, important thing. All the things Kaz asked me to help with were generally finished and delivered within a day or so of him asking, so Iâm in no way responsible for the hiatus, ok? Glad we clarified that.
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