Regardless if you have After Effect or not, it all starts with good art. If your scene looks bad without animation, it won’t look any better with it. So take your time and make a nice believable reflection before applying motion. In many cases the reflected image is slightly shortened, but it’s not always the case. As with any form of illustration, it’s always a good idea to use a reference.



Even if you’ve never used After Effects before, this effect is very easy to understand. If you want slow subtle movement like in my case, wave speed, width, and height should be set quite low. One of the most important settings is where you place the ripple source. I placed my source off the bottom side of the image area so you only see waves moving in one general direction, creating the illusion of a linear flow. In order to do this you must add plenty of extra transparent space around the asset you apply the effect to, as the effect can only be generated within the dimensions of the asset. Play with lots of positions and settings until it feels right for you.

One trick with this method is getting the animation to loop smoothly. Honestly, I got lucky and the settings I liked just happened to loop perfectly on a 2 second timeline. Fortunately, it’s not so miraculous to find this sweet spot. First, get the effect to look how you want it, then search for the magic point in the timeline where it loops.

While I have a lot of experience using After Effects in my graphic design days, this is the first time I’ve used it for pixel art animation. It’s surprisingly easy to create cool effects that are applicable to pixel art and I’m excited about the potential for new animation ideas. Don’t worry if you don’t have access to this software. I’m only talking about the occasional trick here and there, which can still be insightful and inspire your own animation techniques.

Final Thoughts

Whether it has to do with water or not, I hope this collection of flowing animations can provide solutions to your own creative problems. There’s still much to be discussed on the topic of water, and I intend to return to the subject soon. Let me know what trips you up about illustrating or animating water and I’ll try my best to offer solutions.

RESOURCES

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This month I’m sharing another color palette. Introducing Lucky Sevens, a 140 color palette I originally created for my Xenaqua mockup. While it was created with a vivid sci-fi aesthetic in mind, it’s proven to be a very useful general purpose palette. I have to say the value transition across the ramps is very well-balanced and it’s easy to navigate despite the large number of colors. If you like the looks of Xenaqua, or Hangar Helpers, you’ll love this palette. Download Lucky Sevens.



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-By Raymond Schlitter