I won't deny it. I LOVE using Adobe Illustrator. For me it has the ultimate sense of control. True, it sometimes can't give you smoothed results like with smearing or painting in Photoshop, but it has its own useful tools.

In this tutorial, we are going to be using artbrushes to animate. You will find this useful for when you want to make your own Mugen effects.

I will be assuming that you already have a basic grasp of Illustrator. If not, then you really should learn because it's great.

Another point I need to make is that I won't be going into major detail with the steps. Considering how many tutorials I have planned on the horizon (for various different programs, though), I have to keep things simple.

Finally, I like to keep things in greyscale because you can always colour afterwards in Photoshop. In fact, I insist you colour later in Photoshop because you will have more control over colouring.

So, let's begin.

1) For this tutorial, I'm going to make a simple swirl of energy.

Firstly, I've created a glowing ball of energy with a tail using two oval shapes and the Blend tool. Since I want to keep things low memory, I've limited the number of steps for the blend to 6.

Once you have your energy ball, make it into an artbrush.

2) Then, you need to create the path where the energy will be travelling. For this, I suggest you get a reference image, like one of your sprites to give you an idea of where the energy should go.

As you can see, I've made a simple wiggly path.

Once you have your path, you can turn off your reference object IE set the layer with the reference image to 'unseen'

3) If we set our energy object as an artbrush and set it to that path that was just created, it will look something like this:

But we need to have the energy snake along that path not take up the whole thing so use "remove stroke" to return you path to normal.

4) Make a few copies of the layer with the path depending on how many frames of animation you want for the energy. I'm just simply keeping it to 6 frames so I make 6 copies of my path layer.

5) Then what you need to do is to go to each path layer and erase parts of the path for where the energy will travel. What I've done is made the original path pale red as reference to give me an idea of what needs to be erased.

EG)

 

6) Now you go into each "erased" path layer and set them up as artbrush lines IE select the path then click on the energy ball artbrush we made at the beginning.

7) Now all you need to do is save out each of the frames as bitmap images IE GIF or PCX or PNG. I suggest you use the "Save for web" option for this and export as a GIF.

A few tips, though. I like to make a background square at the lowest layer so that when I export out the images, they all line up for easier animating.

Also, you can vary the width of the stroke of your artbrush to animate squash and stretch as well.

Finally, you don't need to limit yourself to simple shapes. Artbrushes allow for complex shapes. Try making a ghost shape or a dragon that flow along sexily.

And that's all!

Have fun creating great swirling effects!

Cheers,

Revanto