How do you make the spell animations you have?
The spell animations* are about 8 times easier to make than the mind game videos** and *** and †, mainly because no complex math is involved. Though some math may be involved, it's not that complex [except for holy and dark elemental spells]. At the end of every video is always the popup number, if any. What do these popup numbers mean? Red popup numbers indicate a normal hit that deals damage. Blue ones mean a critical hit. You never see the blue ones on these videos because they're impossible to see because of the sky color. These indicate critical hits that deal damage. White ones mean supercritical hits. In the restorative spells, you'll only see green numbers which is negative damage, or cure. In these videos, I only show the red and green ones mainly because they're easier to see [or necessary], and that blue and white ones are very rare.
This below, illustrates how these videos are created in a step-by-step process.
- First, while playing my mindgame, I search for monsters to fight. Sometimes, and almost-always, it's a rock I target.
- Upon casting the spell on the rock, I take note of it's effects.
- I change the effects around each time until I find one that is of high interest.
- I repeatedly play those effects that are declared as high interest while writing them down [in the same fashion as I write my stories when multiple actions take place before speech again].
- I play those effects once more to make sure my writings match. For all these spells you see here, they've all been created since about 2000, maybe late 2000. They've been almost unchanged since. Yet, this is about the era when my old "Rise of Atlantis" was being written on paper by pencil/pen. This is what first started them. Since that time, the spell's effects have been almost unchanged.
- Upon viewing these spell effects and checking the notes, I then play the effects by 1/60 of a second at a time. I then start with the basics, a 7F7FFF-colored sky‡, a 00FF00-colored ground, and a 7F7F7F-colored rock. Why do I have such strange colors for instead of even ones? Compression. It saves a byte or two and I know exactly why too.
- Upon playing the spell's effects in my mind frame by frame I copy this information into the graphics program and save the bitmap accordingly. Bitmaps are saved as a count. For animations having up to 9 frames, it'll get saves as 1.bmp for the first one. From 10 to 99 expected frames it'll be saved as 01.bmp for the first one. From 100 to 999 frames, it's 001.bmp. Spell effect animations shouldn't get any more than 200 frames anyway.
- After the main effects come to an end, a popup number appears if necessary depending on the spell that's used. These numbers have their own effects, however, they're easy to reduplicate from video to video as there's a pattern involved.
- After full completion of the spell effects, I test it to make sure it works as it's supposed to. If all is perfected, the final step is done. If there's a bug, I note which frame the bug occurs in and fix it as necessary. Then I retest it. If bugs still persist, I keep fixing them and retesting them until all bugs are clear.
- If there are no bugs or the bugs have been fixed, I then use Winzip to zip up the AVI file twice to ensure a massive compression as it still significantly reduces the file size doing it a second time, typically 800 to 1 for spells.
- The final stage is to upload the ZIP file to my site, make the addition notice and update the necessary pages, including making a shortcut or two on the index page.
This process is far quicker than my mind game videos. I can typically go nearly twice as fast, often four times faster than what I can with even an easy. In 9 hours, I could possibly do all 5 videos of fire and probably all 5 videos of ice as well! That's about 1400 estimated, total frames. It took me about 9 hours to do the video "the Long Fall", which is 641 frames††.
Footnotes:
* You can see these spell animations as a dual-compressed AVI video here. On this page, select the spell series in which you wish to see then on the next page that comes up, select which group of spells you wish to see.
** My mind game is a very complex video-game-like adventure-simulator I play in my mind quite often. To learn all about it, click here.
*** You can see these mind game videos at the location this URLed links takes you.
† The explanation on how I make my mind game videos is explained very well here.
‡ These are the hexadecimal color codes that name colors with massive precision. To learn how to find that exact color, Read this excellent report.
†† You can see this video for yourself, however, though a 112 KB download may not seem like much, when fully unzipped, it becomes 140 MB, that's right, megabytes! To see it, Go here and download it from the table.
