Recently I made my first animation – rotating wings for windmill made by IvanMorve.
Some of you might wonder how I did it. The truth is that was quite simple. Here is a small tutorial, step by step:
NOTICE:
N1: Because vertical and horizontal perspective in TMW are quite the same, our wings will have ratio 100% of width and 70% of height. That ratio makes elliptic shape, and it’s impossible to rotate object after drawing it in this perspective.
N2: To shorten amount of time for this particular task we will use GIMP to rotate the wings – however when we rotate objects there is serious quality loss. To prevent that we will make base wing 2 times larger (512×512 instead 256×256), then rotate it making each frame of animation. At the end we scale it down to proper size and aspect ratio: 256×180 px.
N3: Because of wings symmetry we will make only one fourth part of frames.
STEPS:
S1: Inkscape design. Just a outline. Mine looks like this:
S2: Painting. I redraw wings in GIMP using tablet. Make sure that wings are symmetric.
S3: Now rotate this wings and save it in another file.
3FPS: 90/3 = 30 deg
4FPS: 90/4 = 22,5 deg
5FPS: 90/5 = 18 deg
6FPS: 90/6 = 15 deg
etc..
I made animations with 4fps and 8fps. And I must say that 8fps looks hell better then 4 ;)
S4: Scale down every image to correct size and perspective. In this case its 256 x 256*0,7 ~= 256 x 180 px
S5: Viola! Our frames are ready.