UPDATED : July 2013

Since writing the original post 2 years ago, WWO have now included all of my icons on their site at http://www.worldweatheronline.com/api/docs/weather-icons.aspx. I’ve also updated many of the sets to a massive 92 weather conditions to make them (hopefully) some of the most accurate icons available anywhere, that now more closely reflect the actual weather condition being reported.

Visit my store for the full range of Weather Icons

Little Howard BBC One 4.30pm

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…

Free 'WIND' add-on pack

UPDATE (July 2013):
I have recently updated a number of icon sets to include loads of extra weather conditions which include windy, hurricane, tornado, blowing snow, blizzard and many more. I have also withdrawn the old animated GIF set. But I have left the Free Wind Pack in place just in case anyone is still interested in the arrows, but the classic TV style weather icon packs 1 and 2 now include ‘wind’ as standard. I have updated some links in the original post below to point to the new updated URLs.

Visit the store and check out the complete range of updated Weather Icons

ORIGINAL POST (July 2011):
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