ProVideo Coalition.com: Creating Motion Graphics: Keyframes by Chris & Trish Meyer

The most common applications for simple 3D are either extruded text, or the ubiquitous “flying logo”: a client or show’s name converted into a 3D model, flown across the screen or down into place, often with enough perspective for you to see that it has actual depth. The term flying logo occasionally has derogatory connotations, suggesting something cheesy (cheesy is easy to do in 3D, unfortunately), but in reality a broad range of motion graphic design employs them.

We had the opportunity to create a twist on this theme for Xerox Media West. Xerox’s recent television ad campaign was based around the concept of Greek gods - led by John O’Hurley - helping mere mortals solve their document problems. They wanted to carry this theme over to every aspect of their appearance at COMDEX, a major technology industry trade show - right down to the video monitor countdown before another stage presentation. Originally we thought we would create a flying logo animation for this, but decided instead to go for something more architectural.

We started with a column from one of our pre-built libraries, and added a simple box shape on top with beveled edges to serve as the face for our counter. We then added Xerox’s distinctive “X” on top, and rotated it for visual interest. To accomplish this, we extruded an Illustrator version of their logo in Maxon Cinema 4D. To give the X something to rotate on, we crafted a turntable by creating a circle in Illustrator, and extruding it with a complex bevel profile in Electric Image using Zaxwerks’ Invigorator plug-in mentioned earlier.

This collection of models and shapes was assembled, scaled, and positioned to fit in Cinema 4D (see the figure below). Most 3D programs are able to exchange basic models; we often use the .obj format. Texture mapping the objects was fairly simple: marble from the Artbeats Marble & Granite library, a ground texture from KETIV Just Textures to serve as a bump map to roughen the beveled edges, and a sky movie from Image Shoppe edited to loop every 15 seconds.

Building a set in Maxon’s Cinema 4D, from bottom to top: the column came from a commercial library; the box is a simple primitive made in Cinema, the platter was at the time created with Zaxwerks’ Invigorator inside Electric Image (we would now do it inside After Effects) and imported into Cinema; the X was the result of extruding Illustrator artwork inside Cinema. This screen shot is representative of a typical 3D program, with alternate views of the scene to add arrangement, numerous tool palettes, and windows to manage the objects and the textures applied to them. (Click on the image to see the full project window; it will take a sec...)

Cinema 4D has a raytracing renderer, which meant we could have the sky reflect in our marble. We toned down the strength of these reflections to avoid that cheesy look; instead, it just gives some additional motion along the surface. (These reflections also turned the marble more blue than we wanted; we had to color-correct our texture back to the desired tone.) The X and its turntable were keyframed to rotate once every 30 seconds, giving us a nice loop we could chain together for as long as necessary.

We transfer parts of the work flow from 3D to 2D whenever we can, both to save time and gain more control. In this case, the countdown and supporting text on the face of the column’s box was actually created inside Adobe’s After Effects using a variety of effects, including Alien Skin’s Carve. This resulted in an overall time savings, since we only had to render the 30 second loop in the much slower 3D program, instead of the full five minutes of counting. The final result can be seen below:

The final scene, rendered with ray tracing turned on to get highlights of the sky onto the marble. The numbers and letters on the face of the box were actually faked in After Effects, to save on overall rendering time. The rough-hewn edges on the X and box are the result of a “bump” map in the texture, not of tedious modeling.