In this lesson's scene assignment we'll be animating liquid that's being stirred. Combining this effect with what you know of steam, boiling and fire, you'll be animating a cauldron of bubbling broth.
The character animation is done for you, as are the background elements. It'll be your job, as usual, to complete the scene with effects.
As you've seen in previous scene assignment articles, the video below is a "handout" video. If I were your supervisor in an animation studio, you'd come to me for your next scene and I'd talk you through the individual aspects of the scene and what's required of you, along with any special instructions or technical aspects.
As you're now nearing a full year in the course, this handout video has less hand-holding. Firstly it assumes more familiarity with effects and scene structure and secondly gives you a little credit for your creativity and your ability to create something nice without a strict colour-by-numbers approach. Very loose instructions are your license to do something very much your own.
video 44_layout
As always, try to design these effects with realism in mind. You may be comfortable enough with fire and steam to stylise them if you like, but the bubbling broth may present a challenge, for which realism is a better direction.
I've provided you with 39 frames of the hands stirring animation cycle. The timing you saw in the handout video is 25fps and the hands move smoothly on singles. However, you'll find it easier to animate the broth on doubles, especially when it comes to combining all the elements of base, bubbles and stirring. In this case, you will want to remove every 2nd frame of the hands image sequence and work on doubles. Perhaps later if you're feeling energetic, you can put the singles back in and inbetween all your broth stirring.
As mentioned in the handout, the hand stirring animation works as a cycle, but you may choose to animate straight-ahead without cycling anything. That'd be the easy way out, but I'd like to see a seamless cycle on all FX layers, which is something you should be able to handle pretty well by now.
If you run into problems with cycling all these FX together - for example you might have trouble animating a nice lazy drifting steam if it's on the same cycle timing as the hands - see if you can figure a way around that. Maybe looping all the other FX twice, while the steam loops only once? I'll leave you to solve that problem if you decide to tackle it.
You can always contact me (see bottom of the page) if you have any questions.
If you want to go the extra extra mile with this scene, you might like to consider what other effects would bring this scene fully to life. Consider the following
I created this scene at 960 x 540 and 25 fps. The files in this lesson's pack are the individual images you'll need. After you've set up your scene's dimensions and frame rate simply unzip and import these images onto your timeline layers. Incidentally, the image names indicate the frame numbers, which may help you with timing those FX.
If you choose to do so, rather than use the cauldron and hands animation directly in your scene, feel free to simply use them as reference, then create your own scene assets.
Scene elements
