Photoshop Animation Water Splash

Amy Sundin : Welcome to lesson four of our cell animation and Photoshop series. So there's some crazy stuff happening on the screen behind me right now. Pretty cool. Right? Some of you may notice that the robot looks familiar and that's because for this lesson, our buddy Rich Nosworthy, they helped us out by providing us with some really awesome footage to animate over. Here's what the raw animation looks like. That rich gave us animating in a 3d app, like cinema 40 and then drawing over it is a great way to save a ton of time and make sure you like the animation before you spend hours drawing today. I want to talk about how I did the splash in this animation, but this particular splash is a bit complex. You'll need to work up to that. So instead, we're going to animate a simpler splash and in the next lesson, I'll show you how I colored shaded and finished this animation. All the concepts that I'm going to be showing you today are the same ones that I used in this piece behind me. So let's get started.
Amy Sundin : All right. So let's check out that Rich Nosworthy footage that I was talking about. This is the stuff that we will not quite be working on yet, but after this next couple of lessons, you'll be able to do something like this also. So what's going to go on in this lesson is we're going to start learning how to make a splash. Now, the splash you're seeing in this is pretty complicated looking, but really the principles to it are very easy to understand and learn. So what we're going to do today is a much simpler splash. So this is actually what we're going to be working on today. And it's a much simpler splash in the other one, but all the same principles and timings are used in this particular splash. So let's get started on animating this simpler looking splash. Okay. So let's go over some timing stuff really quick before we get into animating this.
Amy Sundin : So let's focus on just this purple part first, and then we'll talk about the green skirt. So the purple stuff is kind of our blue pier. And if you notice I have these numbers below and those numbers correspond, the purple's going to be the actual drawing that we've done. The orange is the number of frames. So we're starting this animation off on once because we want this to be quick, but we want it to look nice and kind of fluid. So we're going to do on the second drawing the first, one's just going to be that line that goes straight across because you need something to start from with your water. And then the next drawing already, we're kind of like a quarter of the way up. And after that, the third drawing that we're doing, we're already almost pretty much at this peak point of our splash here.
Amy Sundin : So this is the furthest extent of this little bloop thing before on drawing for where it shoots. It's little droplet up in the air. So a few drawings later, you can see we've kind of shot this thing up in the air, and this is just hanging out out here. And that's because we want things to overlap a bit. We do not want everything to happen at one time. We need different timings in animation, and that's what keeps things visually interesting. This is like an overlapping animation. So we're going to leave this one kind of behind while this is already half way, shrunken down, only a couple of frames later. Now, if you notice these orange numbers are now doubles, that's because we're switching from one frame exposures to two frame exposures in here, and that's just to keep our drawing workload down. It still looks as nice.
Amy Sundin : If you wanted to go even more fluid and smooth, you could keep this on all ones, but it's not entirely necessary to do so. So you can see a few more frames later. This guy is still hanging out out here on the 10th drawing. And that's just because it's slowly falling back down. It'll gain speed now, because if you see on drawing 12, it's hit this kind of splash point and it's shot another little droplet up. That's going to hang out and just repeat that same action that we had here. And by drawing 17 or frame number 29, roughly somewhere around there, this isn't an exact precise science, but kind of in that range, we'll be back to just this flat water again. So with the skirt, you notice it's much faster and that's because we really want this to be an accent to just give this, that extra force.