Animated Lighthouse

Animated Lighthouse

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Needed tools:

MuRa Clouds

Flood

A few boat tubes

A few rock tubes.

Click the print button on your browser to print this tutorial.

Open a new image 500 X 500 transparent.

Apply MuRa Cloud. Use the Water 2 preset.

HINT KPT6 Sky Effects would look GREAT here.

Click Color > Adjust Brightness, Contrast. Use the settings below to give the effect of a night sky.

Make a new layer.

Flood this layer white.

Apply MuRa cloud again but select the Under the Sea Preset.

This is the water part of the image so use your selection tool and select the top half and maybe a little more than half and delete.

Click Effects > Geometric Effects > Wave. Apply the settings below.

Throw some boats on there. Make sure that each boat is on it's own layer. Apply flood to each of the boat layers to make a ripple effect in the water.

Make a new layer.

Activate your preset shapes tool and select Rectangle as your shape.

Create as vector unchecked.

Make a rectangle like the one shown below. The color in the color palette in not important at this point.

Activate your Deformation tool. Hold your CTRL key down. Grab the upper left corner of your rectangle and pull in slightly. The right side will come in at the same time. Make the top come ALMOST to a point but there has to be a little flat spot at the top.

Apply your deformation. CTRL + A to select all, use your selection tool and click on your shape (no longer a rectangle) and flood with any stone or brick pattern that you have. Float. Apply the following cutout.

Deselect.

Activate your preset shape tool again.

In your color palette, make stoke NULL and Fill BLACK.

Make a black square at the top of your lighthouse.

Make a new layer and add any stones, rocks, grass, etc that you think would look good here.

Merge Visible layers.

Save your image. Open Animation shop.

File > Preferences > General Program Preferences.\

Click on the Layered Files tab. The settings are shown below. Click ok.

No need to open your image yet.

Click File > New

Make a new image 500 X 500 transparent.

Click Effects > Insert Text Effect.

Select the Backlight effect. The settings are below.

In the Define Text box, enter the number 0.

When you have your settings adjusted, click the Font button.

Choose Times New Roman, bold. size 10.

Click on the Customize button.

In the Customize window, select white as the flare color. Grab the green and red balls at either side of the line shown above and extend them slightly past the square.

Also you will see a little white dot on your customize window. Make your flare line slightly below that as shown above.

Click ok in the customize window and ok in the effect window.

Delete your first frame.

Select all, copy, paste as new animation (CTRL + V)

In the new animation, delete the first and last frames.

Select all.

Click Animation > Reverse Frames.

Copy.

You may now close this animation.

In your original animation, select the last frame.

Right click. Select Paste > After Current Frame.

Look carefully at the number of frames your animation has.

Open the image that you made in PSP.

Duplicate your frames until it has the same number of frames as your flares.

Activate your flares, select all, copy.

Activate your lighthouse. Select all, paste (CTRL + E)

HINT You will need to move your mouse well above your image to get the flares into the black box on top of the lighthouse.

Resize by about 65 or 70 percent.

Save

If you have any comments or question, email me at

kim@pixelbit.com