Question for Artists: how to animate this

I'm trying to get a spray effect for a space ship thruster.. like this clip from the movie Gravity

https://www.dropbox.com/s/anyt2y021wskr ... p.mp4?dl=0

I can sort of achieve the effect using a particle system, but it fails in the physics department, since it doesn't take into account velocity from the ship when it's moving.. so it only shows as a "cone" when the ship is not moving - even then it's a bit wonky. otherwise with any ship movement it looks totally wrong...especially if the ship is moving the same direction of the particle cone, the ship overtakes the expelled particles and it doesn't look right at all.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36234790/ShipMove/index.html

so I was thinking to animate a sprite.. but besides drawing it by hand.. how would one animate something like that? to get like 15 frames or so.. I want to somehow capture a particle effect but I can't do that without printing the background image, then I'd have to somehow separate it so only the spray was on a transparent background... I've used Gimp and Inkscape a bunch but I think drawing it by hand will not look good (if I do it).

any suggestions?

I would do it like this:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/238 ... ipair.capx

andreyin clever use of opacity.. I like that a lot.. so simple.. feels like it just needs a variation or movement inside the sprite...

thanks!

Nice solution andreyin I was going to suggest something similar. jobel Yeah that looks preety cool and its a simple solution... you can just animate 2 or 3 frames with "noise" and you'll get an even better effect.

Ragevortex -like the noise effect in Gimp? that's a great idea.. also to give it that "spray" look.. thanks!

looks decent... I just need to make some sort of residue for when the thruster is shut off. I tried adding a fade, but that doesn't work. Maybe a one-off particle effect on the mist itself (as it's shut off) might work..

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36234790/ShipMove2/index.html

thanks andreyin

jobel looks great... for the residue you can make a simple sprite and have it do something like - on destroy (or any other thing) -create -leftoversprite and that sprite if it has a really fast fade out behaviour should look like leftover dust vanishing into nothing.

Note: you do need to contol the ammount of sprites being created though.