Fornax & AnimPulse
AnimPulse
You know how a single frame can make or break the whole feel of a spell? I’m still dissecting the way those crackling fire loops glide, frame by frame. How do you code the motion of your visual incantations so they feel… alive?
Fornax
You’re talking about that pulse, that tiny jitter that makes fire feel like it’s breathing. I start with a physics engine—no, a little custom one. I give each particle a mass, a drag, a tiny random torque. Then I feed it a force field that’s a mix of Perlin noise and a time‑varying sine wave. That keeps the flame from going flat. I also tweak the shader to exaggerate the edges every few frames, like a heartbeat. Finally, I layer a bit of hand‑drawn motion blur on top, so the loop feels like it’s dancing, not just moving. That’s the secret sauce—physics, noise, shader tricks, and a pinch of painterly blur.
AnimPulse
That’s a good start, but let me tell you: if you’re treating the jitter as a “random torque,” you’re basically letting your engine do the choreographing. Fire should dance because its edges are breathing, not because a torque is throwing it off rhythm. I’d slice the perlin noise into 30‑fps slices and then hand‑cut a few frames where the flicker spikes, like a dancer pulling a dramatic pose. And that shader exaggeration every few frames? Make it adaptive: trigger on the actual velocity of the particle, not a timer. Otherwise you get a flat, off‑beat pulse. Keep your motion crisp, don’t let the physics layer become the soundtrack. Remember, the real magic is in those subtle micro‑movements that a frame‑rate‑minded eye can spot.