I got “inspired” today by episode 20 of the show Heroes and felt like I needed to play around a bit. So I quickly took my IXUS camera and shot myself in front of my blue wall and started “creating”. The idea was to create the “flame-boy” effect – where the “hero’s” hand/arm bursts into flame.

At first I tried creating it entirely inside Shake, but got nowhere. After about an hour and a half, I gave up and launched Particle Illusion, where it was fairly simple to create and animate the “flame” the way I wanted to (altho, I didn’t really spend too much time on it, since this was a quick test). I know stuff like this is usually animated with fluids or particles in an app like Maya, but I don’t have the luxury of having knowledge on that stuff. So I guess I’ll pursue creating this entirely with 2D apps and I’ll see how it goes.

This is part 1 of this test composite. Stay tuned for part 2 (when I’ll get back to it).