Heavy Rain - A Forum Set Tutorial

To create this set you will need:

PSP and Animation Shop

Both sold by Corel

A Tube and a Close-Up

I used art by Ismael Rac

Tubes and License can be bought at his Store

Alien Skin Eye Candy 5 Textures - Texture Noise

DSB Flux - Bright Noise

MuRa Meister - Cloud

Font of choice

Ready?

Lets Begin!

Choose a light color for your FG and a dark color for your BG

On the FG, make a FG/BG Gradient

Angle 45, repeats 3

New Image 600x250

MuRa Meister - Cloud

Default Settings-hit the Reset button

New Layer

Fill with your gradient

Add Noise - Uniform - 100% - Mono checked

Motion Blur - 315, 100%

Edge Effects - Enhance

Change the blend mode to overlay, hard light

or some other one that you like and merge visible

BORDERS

You will need to refer back to this section to make the borders for the Avatar

Shift+D to make a copy and crop to 150x150

Set aside for now

New Layer - Name Gradient Layer

Fill with gradient - Select All-Contract 2 - Delete - Deselect

Drop Shadow 0,0,80 and 5

Highlight BG Layer and make a New Layer

Select All-Contract 10-Fill with your Dark color- Contract 1-Delete

Keep Selected

Expand 1-Selections Invert-New Layer-Fill with light color-Deselect

Drag this layer to just above the BG and rename ColorBorder

Highlight BG - Paste CU - Move right - Blend Mode Soft Light

Crop your Tag

Paste your Tube and move left-Blurry Drop Shadow

Move this Tube layer to just below the Gradient Layer

Crop your Tag again

Time to add your Name, CR Info and License if necessary

Ok, lets merge some Layers and get ready to animate

Hide your BG , Close-Up and ColorBorder Layers and Merge Visible

Now your Layer Palette should look like this:

ANIMATION

Duplicate the BG Layer twice for a total of 3 layers

Duplicate the ColorBorder Layer twice for a total of 3 layers

On the ColorBorder Layers:

DSB Flux - Bright Noise - 31, mix checked

Hit the Mix button once each time

On the BG Layers:

EC5 Textures -Texture Noise - On the Settings Tab:

On the Basic Tab:

Hit the Random Seed button once for each Layer

It's time to fire up Animation Shop

Hide the top two BG Layers and the top two ColorBorder Layers

Copy Merged and Paste as a New Animation in Ani Shop

Back in PSP

Hide the bottom BG Layer and the bottom ColorBorder Layers

Unhide the middle BG Layer and middle ColorBorder Layer

Copy Merged and Paste after current frame in Ani Shop

Back in PSP

Hide the middle BG Layer and the middle ColorBorder Layers

Unhide the top BG Layer and top ColorBorder Layer

Copy Merged and Paste after current frame in Ani Shop

View Animation to make sure it looks right and if it does-You're Done!

Save as a gif

AVATAR

Remember the 150x150 avatar you made earlier?

Open it-add the same borders and animate the same way

Here's what it looks like:

Another Example, made for my pal Beverly

I love seeing people's results when they try my tutorials.

Please leave a link in the comments section on my Blog