Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2019 11:49 am Post subject:
Explosion animations
I recently became interested in creating new explosion animations for TS modding and figured I could share my progress with the public here as I continue to learn and tweak my methodology. Not completely satisfied with my current results but I figure there's no reason I can't share them as a resource along with my knowledge. They use the TS anim palette.
I used http://explosiongenerator.com/ to generate the source frames. This will yield you 100-200+ images at a high framerate though, so what I do after that is delete frames until I get to around 20-40 frames which seems to be the standard range for TS and RA2. Then I turn the frames into a single sheet so I can start editing them all at once.
Apart from color reducing to a palette, the main obstacle is turning the full transparency into a 1-bit alpha and also making it look good. A common complaint with generated particle explosions is that they end up looking too soft and round in shape, so I think this can be partly mitgated by playing around with 1-bit dithering on just the alpha when making it black and white. Then you palettize the image after the alpha has been processed.
The last element I thought about was the flow of the animation itself and how the raw generated output can feel a bit too linear. So I tried working around this by selectively removing more frames during certain stages.
Still learning how to manage all the parameters in the generator. I think it's the dampening slider for the smoke particles which controls how long they linger after the fireball. QUICK_EDIT
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