Fast Fable vol. 2

Hey guys, welcome to Fast Fables. Today we're going to be animating this rocket flying through space with only a few effects on some keyframes.

We're going to start by making the project five seconds long and changing the background to this dark purple. In the link below you'll find a selection of rockets we've designed for you, so pick the one that suits you best.

For the background, we're going to use the circle tool to create some arcs and planets that we'll later use to make the animation a little more dynamic. We're going to use the pen tool to draw a star and mutiply it using the duplicator tool.

Make sure to set the duplication type to random and to play around with the seed until you have a layout you like.

Now moving on to animation, to generate a trail coming out of the rocket, we're going to first create rectangle. We're going to apply a wave warp effect and tweak the width and height until we have some nice wavy edges. After that we're going to apply a pinch effect and set the amount to 1%.

None of these numbers are set in stone. So feel free to play around with them until things look right to you. We're going to bring this to life by animating the movement on the wave warp effect. Remember to change the easing to linear or else the animation will start and stop instead of flowing smoothly.

To add more layers to the rocket's trail, all we need to do is duplicate this layer and change its color and width. In order to create the effect of the rocket approaching the sun, we're going to animate the rocket scaling down, and the width of the trails becoming narrower. Scaling and moving the planets and arcs will also give the animation a better sense of depth.

Now we can loop this by switching the keyframe's behavior with playback mode. Extend the timeline to 10 seconds, select all the layers, hit U, and change the playback mode of the keyframes to ping-pong.

Apply this to all the keyframes, except for the wave warp movement keyframes that will set to continue, just so the trail doesn't get reversed.

Finally, to give this animation some texture we'll create a dark gray rectangle, apply a grain effect and set it to overlay.

And there it is. The same principle can be applied to anything that requires a flowing element, whether it's a rocket , a waterfall or a flag.

Thanks for watching and catch you on the next one.