Fire Animation
From The Battle for Wesnoth Wiki
By rhyging5 (Original Post).
- Make a mask. This must to have the form you want. In this case, must be more or less like the sword. Note that have a outline totally blur, specially the up zone.
- Draw the flames in a pixel art. Their size will affect subsequent animation. So take a look at the image to get an idea of an standard size. We must also decide the colour and appearance. I use some Photoshop filters, like brightness and others.
- Make a vertical tile of theses flames to make the loop of the animation. Why vertically? because fire expires from the bottom upwards.
- Apply the mask we make on first step to this tile.
- To emphasize the brightness we can make another layer like this.
- Make the tile move up 1 or 2 pixels every time, but keep the mask anchored where it is.
- As an additional, we can make a different light/shadow that the fire produces on nearby objects (not included in this tutorial).
As you can see, with a little work, we can get some good FX. Hope it's useful!