Just a quick heads up for anyone searching online for the icons that appear on the World Weather Online site.

There’s a number of different weather icon sets available from our store. Professionally designed by the same guy (me) who designed the BBC weather graphics.

You can also download a FREE wind arrows and icons pack to complement the icon sets.

Watch out for special offers and discount codes. Currently there’s a special 40% discount on the full set of 3 icon sets (coloured backgrounds, transparent PNGs, and animated GIFs).

A quick reminder about today’s episode of Little Howard’s Big Question (4.30 BBC One). It’s called ‘Where is Big Howard?’ and features a guest appearance from Lady Gaga. And a massive pork pie. It’s also got some bloke who claims to be Big Howard but clearly isn’t.

Confused? You might be. Just as confused as I was when trying to composite a cartoon boy behind a glass screen with writing on it which had to be replaced by some different writing and then have a woman wearing a lobster on her head wander around in front of it.

Anyway, to find out what the gibbing flump is going on you’ll just have to watch BBC One at 4.30 this afternoon.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of customary sneak peeks…

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Here’s a little test of Newton – the physics engine for After Effects (almost a snip at €179 from motionboutique.com).

I wondered how easy it would be to build a quick pinball simulation – so I threw together some pretty crude shapes in Illustrator, pasted them on to an After Effects layer and let Newton do the rest. It automatically splits each mask on to individual layers (if you choose to) and allows you to set all kinds of properties for each object (friction, bounce, angular and linear damping etc).

I did cheat the flippers a bit, which in the original project were just flapping about like crazy using wiggle expressions. Tweaking them for the few collisions is the only post-Newton fiddling that’s gone on. Oh, apart from tilting the whole thing in 3D and putting auto-orient towards camera on the ball. The important thing here is that the motion of the ball is entirely automatic and probably next to impossible (or at least mind-numbingly tedious) using traditional keyframing.

Anyway, here’s the result.
watch video…

Here’s a special add-on pack for our TV-style Weather Icon Sets – containing a new wind icon and a few different sets of wind arrows in 8 directions.

The icons come in various formats – PNGs with solid coloured backgrounds, PNGs with transparency, and animating GIFs – making them completely compatible with our current icon sets 1, 2, and 3.

The addition of a ‘WINDY’ cloud symbol will help to make the sets more compatible with the likes of Yahoo! Weather and Google Weather too.

The Wind Pack is free to download from the store.