Spaceship GIF

This is my attempt at creating a GIF.

The whole thing was made from scratch using photoshop and it consists of 20 layers each 0.1 seconds long.

 The beginning was very simple nice I just needed to create the basic assets as a foundation for the more detailed sections of he GIF, I first made the ship which I grabbed inspiration from Star Wars Rogue Ones gunship in terms of wings the rest was made from scratch.

The first thing I did was make a outline of the ships body, then I started adding things like the cockpit, vents, and reactor as well as engines on paper. After that I moved on to powerpoint and started making the outline of the ships body there in a separate layer.


I then moved on to more complex things like detailing the hull.
I also added two small lights on the tips of the wings to make it seem like a actual spaceship.








I then started making three different versions for the flames.


I wanted the flames to look unique and to be able to go from small, medium to large which I succeeded in producing.

The flames were all all made from the first one (the small flame in the middle) after which I moved on to the make the medium sized flame and then the large.

I first made outline of the onager sections then added the yellow and dark orange sections, after I was happy with how it looked I used the eraser tool to add a bit of a shade to the flames to make it look more alive in a sense.

After that I went through the challenge of creating the effect of it moving, I first moved the ship up and down in the layers to give the effect thats its somewhat hovering in space, then I started creating different STARS for the background so to make it seem as its moving.

During this process I had a lot of problems such as the stars looking too bit, not moving at all and over all the colour as well.

I created five versions of stars alone all of which were meant to work together in one gif, but it was a ugly mess of pixels that were mashed together which wasn't what I wanted at all.

In the end I started from scratch with the stars and made two completely new layers which I then used one after another in the animation.

The stars looked more like sticks which has a fading out effect at their ends which makes them look like they were passing by.

Strangely they were compared to gunfire rather than passing stars.

I then created a small purple comet of sorts to give that extra feel of being in space where asteroids and comets are common, it also had several versions of it, initially it meant to look more egg shaped with a more smooth cloud of smoke behind it.

But that was way too big and was very difficult to animate, so I went with a more skinny version that had a more dusty appearance with particles rather than with smoke, my inspiration was the red stone torch from Minecraft which I actually modified a bit to make it more round rather than square.

I also made several different versions of the particles so that whilst passing by the ship the comet looked like it was actually leaving behind particles.



The difficult part was when I had to link all of these factors into a gif, I had to start with a certain flame and make sure it end on the flame that was at the start of the animation and same goes for the stars and the position of the ship.

It took me a long time to make the animation seem seamless because I was always stuck at the fact that the ship was in the wrong position or that the flame or lights were not correct.

In the end I created the gif in a format of 2040 pixels and uploaded it to youtube and made it its separate form as a GIF.