Last night I got this tornado working in After Effects before heading to bed. This is supposed to be a fire tornado however, so I have a lot of work left to do. For the inner flaming core I plan to use a particle effect which swirls as needed. The plan is to map that effect with a fractal noise that moves from left to right. That core is what I plan to ignite on fire using glows and orange yellow colors.
The other large problem right now is that the clouds around the tornado are still. I need to get them rotating around the rotation of the cone. To solve that problem I will need to go back into Procreate and separate the balloons from the background. Right now if I try to animate and distort the clouds, the balloons will also distort.
I will have to re-composite the scene from scratch. I will isolate the background and make a depth map for that, then I will make a depth map for the balloons alone. The balloons will be composited with the depth map and have a background of a green screen. That green screen mp4 will be composited on top of the background with its depth map. I am sure there are a bunch more fractal and displacement effects that will get added as I am working. The cloud rotation will be accomplished with pin animation and rotating displacement maps.
It looks like I have a solid day’s work to pull this all together, so let me get to it.