I think you'll agree that folks who live in the North are lucky, as they get this fantastic display of winter in the form of snow when the folks from the South can only dream of snow for Christmas. Fortunately, everybody has a chance to create digital snow and put it on a website in any part of the world. I showed you how to create that effect in my previous tutorial. But a static picture of falling snow isn't realistic enough, so let's animate the flakes!
Open the.psd file with the snow from the previous tutorial. You should have the following layers: Foreground Snow, Background Snow, Wind1, Wind2. The names can be different, but if you've read the previous tutorial you, know that these names perfectly match the layers' functions.
Let's start with Foreground Snow. Duplicate it and then move it using the Offset filter with the following settings:
The exact numbers don't matter so much, but the Wrap Around option does. Don't forget to select it. So, now you've got a new somewhat shifted Foregrounding Snow layer. However, a problem has emerged in the lower half of the layer in the form of a streak (depending on the size) that sticks like a sore thumb from the picture. This area was at the border of the picture before the shift. Fortunately, we can easily get rid of it. Using the Marquee tool, select the entire 10 pixel streak. After that, apply 3 pixel Feather to it and press Del to remove the contents. Then Deselect.
So, now the new snow layer is ready. It is almost like the previous one, but positioned differently. Now a couple of other similar layers need to be created. To simplify the task, you may duplicate the newly created layer twice and apply the Offset filter to each of the duplicates, but with different Horizontal and Vertical settings. Now you won't have to remove the former joint area as you've duplicated the layer without joints. Hide the layers created in this tutorial and get the following palette of layers:
On to Background snow! In fact, the process is very similar to creating additional layers with Foreground Color. But even a lot easier. You only have to duplicate the layer with Background Snow three times and apply the Offset filter with different vertical and horizontal settings. Each time I simply took the previous settings multiplied by two. As there are no obvious joints in these layers, they don't have to be removed.
The easiest thing is the wind. You can still duplicate the wind layers 3 times and use the Offset filter to shift them, or you can simply use the Move tool and move them around in a random fashion.
As a result, we have 16 layers containing snow and wind and one background layer with Carmen Electra. The second part of this tutorial will be done in Image Ready, so switch to Image Ready.
Create 4 frames in Image Ready. To do this, click 3 times on the Duplicate Current Frame button in the Animation menu (Window>Animation).
Now, make one layer of each type visible for each of the frames. And hide the rest. That is, 5 layers have to be visible for each of the frames: 1 - background, 2- Background Snow (or one of the copies), 3 - Foreground Snow (or one of the copies), 4 - Wind1 (or one of the copies), 5 - Wind2 (or one of the copies). You are free to choose the order without repeating the variants. This is how I've positioned everything (the picture shows all the visible layers for each of the frames).
And finally, select all the frames (click on the first one, then hold down the Shift button and click
on the last one). After that, set the Delay Time to 0.1 sec (just click on the time diplay below any of the frame thumbs and then select 0.1). Now everything is ready to save and
review.
And this is the final result:
The only thing left for me to say is to warn you that the image will now take up a lot of space, as the initial image was very large. This technique is more fitting for smaller images. Well, thank you for your attention and have a merry white Christmas!
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