This is a safe place -- we can all admit that at one time or another in our childhood, we wished we lived in a video game. (If we're really honest, we'd admit that desire hasn't subsided in our adulthood.) Evan Abrams shares a helpful tutorial that walks us through how to create and animate health bars and apply a "16-bit looking" mosaic effect make them look like our favorite vintage games. Continue on to check it out.
The tutorial is fairly simple to follow if you know your way around After Effects (because when Abrams takes off he doesn't slow down.) The first thing you'll add to your comp is the fighter's name -- if you're thinking mine would be "Chun V", you'd be wrong. I was never Chun Li, I was Ryu every time.
Next, you'll add two rectangles to form your health bar, one for the border and one for the fill. After you apply a bevel to the border and a gradient to the fill, things get a tad more complicated -- using keyframes to animate a waning health bar, and of course, making it look all vintage and awesome with the mosaic feature found in After Effects.
With all of the tutorials out there that teach us how to create energy balls, we definitely needed a tutorial that actually gave all of those attacks their power -- the power to damage health. Otherwise we'd be out there flinging hadoukens and shoryukens for no reason.
Did the tutorial help you? Do you have any over your own tips that could make this process simpler, faster, better? Who's your favorite video game fighter? (Ryu/Raiden here.) Let us know in the comments.
