'One might need an umbrella...'

Yes, somewhat bizarrely, that’s Prince Charles weather presenter extraordinaire during a visit to the BBC in Scotland yesterday.

Seems he did a pretty good job – you can judge his efforts for yourself over here on the BBC site. By all accounts it’s also causing quite a stir on YouTube.
 

‘A heart full of songs. A van full of idiots.’

The film is described as ‘a darkly comedic love story, set in the west of Ireland and New York about a musician, Sean O’Malley (Sean Maguire) who writes an album for Amy, the girl he loves (Lorna Anderson), in an attempt to redeem himself. The album takes him on a roller-coaster journey of self discovery, where he is both helped and hindered by his misfit band mates.’

The story, written by Fiona Graham, was inspired by the music scene of the west of Ireland. The film follows, largely in flashback, the joy and heartache behind Sean’s songs and the events that led him to write each song.

‘Songs for Amy’ has a great soundtrack (see www.sonnyandskye.com/productions/music with tracks by Jim McKee, Ultan Conlon, Alabama 3 and the wonderful (and incidentally, fellow native of my wife’s home town of Keshcarrigan!) Eleanor Shanley.

‘Songs for Amy’ is directed by Konrad Begg, written by Fiona Graham and Produced by Fiona Graham and Angela Murray.

And my own contribution to what looks to be great music-inspired Irish independent movie were a number of ‘visual effects’ shots, that (all being well) won’t be noticed by a single person.

For more information about ‘Songs for Amy’ see www.sonnyandskye.com

You can join Songs For Amy on Facebook

Premier League Studio

Here’s the new set for the Premier League. The imagery features a couple of super-hi-resolution 3D renders of the premier league trophy (kindly supplied by David Phelan at Mode Vision Ltd), mixed with a load of additional layers to provide a little gentle (and seamlessly looping) animation. And finally lens flare effects using Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plug-in of course.

GAA Allianz Leagues Studio

And here’s the new GAA set.

It uses the same 3D studio model as the studio above, but with a new set of animating screens inspired by stadium floodlights (which figure prominently in the title sequence). I built an HD looping crowd animation and used it to fill up a high-resolution daytime (empty) stadium shot, before giving the whole thing a dusky twilight feel, replacing the original sky with one taken from outside my studio in Leitrim. And finally, of course, plenty of optical flares.

Once again, the screens and additional textures have all been built within, and output from, one mighty After Effects project.

A level question

I pop up in one of the externally set assignments for A-level Art and Design. [thanks for the copy Sue!]

It says: ‘When making your response, refer to appropriate examples that might include the work of Mike Afford …’.

I wonder how many students will choose that question and arrive here looking for appropriate examples..?

Seriously though, if there are any students reading this, please feel free to drop me a line with any questions you may have. I do get quite a few student enquiries, and although it may take a little while getting back to you, I do try my best to answer every one.

 

It’s a cute set of 40+ icons including night-time versions, all PNGs with transparent backgrounds. As an added bonus, this set includes the original weather symbols as vectors, so you can export your own versions at whatever size you like with no loss of quality.

 
Our new, improved store is now powered by Pulley (from Big Cartel).

BBC Weather map colours

I’d noticed that the new BBC Weather website was using a different colour for the sea on their maps.

I’d originally designed the weather maps with a deeper blue for the sea, so I was intrigued to see the colour had changed to a paler, less saturated, and slightly more ‘greeny’ blue (some of the more ‘greeny’ blues I’d previously reserved for light rain).

One of the first effects I noticed was that the actual colour on screen for certain levels of light rain over the sea was virtually identical to that of light cloud.

I suppose it’s just a small point really. It’s still fairly obvious where the rain is – but I was just a bit puzzled as to why a (presumably) cosmetic change to the sea colour should have made the rain data in particular so much more ambiguous and obfuscated.

Anyway – I think I’ve figured out why the new maps don’t look quite right to me.

Just a theory this – but when I compared a map showing the forecast a few hours from now with a longer-range forecast it looked as though the rain data was showing up a bit more clearly on the latter. And that is despite the long-range data being of a lower resolution. Take a look at the image below, and hopefully you’ll see what I mean. The map on the left uses higher resolution data, but even so, that band of rain I’ve circled looks kind of duller. A similar band of rain on the right-hand map looks kind of brighter to me.

I know the higher resolution map is picking up more areas of heavy rain within that band (and consequently displaying deeper blue areas here and there) – but I reckon what’s actually going on is that the layers of data are being drawn in the wrong order.

I could be wrong, but it looks very much to me as if the short-range maps are drawing the rain layer first and then having the ’shadowy’ cloud layer drawn on top. Since the rain only appears where there’s cloud (naturally enough!) the end result is that the entire rain layer is being darkened down by a transparent black layer on top.

The long-range map appears to be (correctly) displaying the cloud data first (like a shadow on the ground) with the rain data drawn on top.

Back in my old BBC days this would normally be the point at which I would stroke my chin sagely and say “Hmmm… Possibly a z-buffering issue…”

Anyhoo, as I say I can’t be sure, but it should be much easier to tell once it starts snowing everywhere…!

* I should point out that I haven’t been puzzling about this non-stop for a couple of days. It’s been more a kind of intermittent puzzling.

BBC Weather beta site

And there they are – back again, just like an old friend!

By the looks of things they’ve had to be tweaked a bit to cope with appearing on white backgrounds, so they have made two sets depending on the background colour. Consequently white clouds appear as grey clouds from time to time, depending on where they sit. I’ll be honest – I think that’s a bit of a shame, and particularly problematic over that map, but hey – they’re such classic icons that it’s just nice to see them back. And it is a beta site after all, so I’m assuming it’s still very much ‘work in progress’.

For the true weather symbol fans, it looks like there’s a new icon for ‘drizzle’ that didn’t appear in the original set (it always used to be single raindrop, same as ‘light rain’ – now it’s a sprinkling of tiny dots). Other weather types like ‘fog’ and ‘mist’ look like they’re staying as plain text.

weather symbols (night)

Nice one!

Anyway, there they are. And a very welcome development too.

As always, I’m sure the BBC Weather symbols remain the property of the BBC and they would be unlikely to allow their use elsewhere (although I’ve come across several places where they are being used fairly indiscriminately for profit).

But if you are looking for similar ‘classic’ TV-style weather icons maybe for iPhone or iPad apps, or websites of your own, and you don’t want to risk copyright infringement, then I have an ever growing range of royalty free symbol sets available for download. The ideal guilt-free alternative to ‘borrowing’ the BBC ones.

Oh, and if you’re looking for the ideal Weather Gifts for Christmas – why not check out the range of classic weather symbol t-shirts and hoodies – there’s something for men, women and kids over at the ‘Classic Weather Icons’ Spreadshirt store. You can choose from a range of symbols and also choose the colour of your t-shirt or hoodie. Great fun!

Here’s the recently completed promotional video for the MxV1 – a revolutionary putter with a curved surface that matches the diameter of the golf ball ensuring a perfect hit each time.

The MxV1 Putter is based on the principals of Newton’s Cradle (MxV = mass x velocity = momentum).

“The radius of our putter face is exactly that of a standard US Golf Ball (1.68 inches) and even with a minor tolerance we have found more accurate strikes and optimal roll” says Brian Wittman (inventor of the MxV1) “By essentially striking a ball with another ball, you almost can’t miss the center of gravity.

The 3D animation for this video was all done in Cinema 4D using a supplied Solidworks model of the putter head converted to .fbx using Rhino3D.

The editing and post production is all in After Effects with, among others, Trapcode Particular and Magic Bullet Looks 2.0.

The soundtrack is all built using Pro Scores from videocopilot.net

A few weeks ago I had to produce a set of bespoke animations based on my ‘old-school’ weather symbols for use in an app – each as a single sheet of individual frames that could be cycled through within the app.

Anyway – it got me thinking about the (’new’) BBC weather icons I designed back in 2005 and whether I could produce a similar set of my own with more realistic weather effects using proper particles and then animate them somehow on a web page without resorting to animated GIFs…

With any luck you’ll be able to see a little ‘light snow showers’ icon looping away on the left there.

For anyone interested, I’ll quickly explain how it’s done…

Basically all we’re doing is loading up one long image with all the frames in sequence and cycling through each frame by moving the background position on the fly. I’m using Spritely (spritely.net) which is a jQuery plugin for creating animating sprites and backgrounds using pure HTML and JavaScript. It’s very easy to use and works on loads of browsers and devices.

Building the animations

All of the animations were built in After Effects, the rain, snow, sleet, hail etc were generated using Trapcode Particular from Red Giant Software (redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/trapcode-particular/).

The key to getting the animations to loop seamlessly was to create a single layer using Particular which had a load of particles created off screen at the top for just a few frames, so they all fall down through the shot and disappear completely at the bottom some time later. I then chose a nice frame somewhere in the middle that was full of particles and marked that frame as the loop point. Then I duplicated the layer and slid one of them forwards a bit.

The end result is that one layer has all the particles appearing from nothing (and ending at the ‘loop’ frame marker) while the other layer starts on the ‘loop’ frame marker and has all the particles disappearing out of shot. The overall effect is a single seamless loop of particles continuously falling. Obviously the total number of frames in your loop can’t be any less than half the time it takes for the particles to enter and leave the shot, otherwise the loop won’t be seamless. Actually, it probably needs to be exactly half. There’s a good tutorial by Aharon Rabinowitz on how to loop particles properly which explains it all very nicely.

With a little bit of fiddling it was pretty easy to get the rain animations down to a neat 16 frames. Obviously the snow falls more slowly, so ‘light snow’ ended up running to 64 frames. Heavy snow is at 48 frames, lightning 32, hail is 16.

Animating the sprites

Doing the actual animation on a web page is very easy. The example above and some more over here use Spritely (spritely.net). All you have to do is load jQuery and Spritely on the page, define a <div> element with the height and width of a single frame, and the whole image strip as the background and then one line of script starts the animation going using your specified frame rate (mine are all 25 frames per second) and the total number of frames in the animation.

Obviously there’s one more process I haven’t mentioned – which is basically how to stick 64 separate images together to form one long strip. I daresay there are utilities out there that allow you do this – but I’m grateful to Dan Waylonis from nekotech.com who wrote and sent me a little utility which does exactly that.

As always, if anyone is interested in finding out more, please do leave a comment.

And if you would like to have the full set of weather sprite animations they’re available as a download from the store.

Weather Symbol Set 6 comes as a full set of 42 icons, plus 10 bonus alternative icons (more on that later).

They are saved as PNG images at two sizes. Firstly there’s a set at 64×64 pixels which makes them useable from the word go. But for the first time I’ve also included a complete set at the original size (512×512 pixels) – these can be used as backgrounds, or scaled down to whatever size might be needed.

They cover the usual types of weather, and I’ve also included 10 alternate ‘night-time’ symbols without the crescent moon showing, just in case these need to be used in conjunction with real moon-phase data.

Incidentally, the clouds featured in this set are 100% Irish! (The clouds that I used for the current BBC Weather icons when I was working back in London at the Weather Centre were from photos I took in Surrey..)

Anyway. These new weather icons are available to download now. Enjoy!

Weather T Shirts

It’s just part of a new range of ‘weather icon’ inspired T-shirts and clothing available now at our Spreadshirt Store – Classic Weather Icons.

And it’s the ideal Christmas gift for the Weather fan in your life…!

See also the ‘Keep Cool’ summer version with a classic sunshine icon. I know that summer’s over now, but the ‘Keep Cool’ T-Shirt would still look great wedged between a couple of hot and sweaty commuters on a packed District Line tube during rush hour.

Little Howard Awards Show

Oh, and there’s also some dancing ants.
 

World Weather Online Icons

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).

Little Howard BBC One 4.30pm

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…

Lady Gaga and possibly not Big Howard

Come to think of it, that's possibly not Lady Gaga either

And that's definitely not Big Howard

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.