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Animate falling snow

I will be teaching you how I make my snow-animations.
I didn’t invent this technique! It’s something I picked up along the way, and maybe have given my personal twist to ^_^


We will be making the snow on this banner:




Banner is free for you guys to use for whatever!

TOOLS

  • Adobe Photoshop CS
  • Adobe ImageReady CS

I do not know how to translate this to other programs, so please, don’t ask!


Part 1: The base
I will not show you how I made this base, because it’s rather trivial for this tutorial. You can use any base you want.


Anyway, open your base in Photoshop.



Create a new, empty layer and call it Snow.

Pick a soft round brush of an intermediate size.
I chose a size 12, but it all depends on personal preference. We’ll be changing the look of the brush anyway ;) .

In the brush palette, go to Brush Tip Shape and select the spacing box. Move the slider to the right until you see seperate soft dots.
The amount of spacing you choose again depends on your personal preference.

Still in the brush palette, check the Shape Dynamics box. Adjust the size jitter so that your brush now consists of soft dots of all different sizes.
You can see my settings in the image on the right. Experiment yourself to see what each setting does!

Final brush-tweaking: Scattering. Make sure the box next to scattering in the brush palette is checked.
Adjust the slider underneath scatter, so that your dots move from the center axis. Experiment until you find something that suits you!

On the snow layer, brush with the newly created brush (in white). Use the eraser tool to remove clusters of dots that are to heavy.

Duplicate the snow layer once.

Go to Image – Canvas Size and change the height to 200%. Make sure your anchor is set as shown in the image on the right.

Press V to select the Move tool and move the copied Snow layer up into the upper half of the canvas.
The original height of this banner was 200px. After the change in canvas size, it’s now 400px high. So to make sure I moved the layer exactly 200px up, I used a little trick: Hold the shift key and simultaniously click the up-arrow. The layer has now moved 10px upwards. Another 19 clicks moves the layer exactly 200px (20 times 10px=200px).
So, for an icon of 100px high, click the up-arrow 10 times whilst holding the shift.

Merge the two snow layers into one: Press Ctrl E.

Adjust your Canvas size again to the original size: Choose a height of 50% and again pay attention to the anchor point. Press Proceed when prompted.

It will seem like everything is exactly the same as before, but Photoshop remembers that your snow layer has a height of 200%, which will come in handy when animating!

Now our preperations are finished. Time to start animating: Open your file in Image Ready



Part 2: Animating
Your file is now opened in ImageReady.
In the Animation palette you (should) can see one frame.

Duplicate the frame and with this second frame selected turn to the Layer palette. Make sure the snow layer is selected and move the layer down for 100%.
In my case, this means I have to move the layer down for 200px. Using the Shift and down-arrow, this is easily done!
So, again, for an icon of 100px, you need to move the layer down for 100px!


When comparing the first and second animation frame, they will (should) look exactly the same. Only difference is the snow layer that has been moved!



Select the first frame and click the Tween button on the animation palette.

Tween With: Next Frame

Frames to add: Depends on how smooth you want the animation to be. I chose 30. For an icon you want to use on LJ, pick a small number to reduce the size of your icon!

Check Boxes: Make sure they are all checked!



Now you have an animation of Tween Number + 2 frames (in my case 32) of which the first and last frame look exactly the same. To make a smooth animation delete either the first, either the last frame (so I’m left with 31 frames).



I left the delay of the frames to 0, but this is personal preference. Experiment to see what you like best.
Also make sure your looping is set to forever!



All that’s left now is saving. Go to File – Save Optimized as….


Finished!



R E M A R K :

If you made a snow icon for use on Livejournal, you have to make sure the size of your gif stays bellow 40K. To know how to do this, I suggest you go check out the saving process in the Movie Icon Tutorial!