Motion Graphics Showreel
This week I moved away from the title sequence to begin working on my showreel.
I decided to base my showreel around a selection of buzzwords and would choose a technique to represent in each buzzword. The buzzwords were:
I was keen to try and hone my skills in the simulation software Houdini so I began working on prompt number one- Fluidity:
INtro Animation
I wanted to have my logo animated in some way as the intro to my showreel, so I came up with the idea of having a pen draw the logo on paper as this is the style that the logo is supposed emulate.
So first things first I used After Effects to create this ink-bleed animated text. using an exploit in the time blend effect imported from the old 2014 version of After Effects we can essentially create a loop of effects where the same loop is applied onto itself repeatedly.
By putting the displace effect in this loop and using a noise texture as the displacement input we can create this effect:
Next In blender we can use this texture as the mask between two shaders- a paper shader and a wet ink shader.
So next we need a spline path version of the logo so that when we add in the pen model we can have it follow this path rather than having to animate it by hand:
Then I downloaded a pen model from "blend kit" and using a follow path constraint for each of the paths I had the pen following each curve in turn:
However, when I rendered this it just looked like the pen was floating along above the page- so I added a particle emitter at the base of the nib to try and emulate the subtle ink spray you get when drawing a fountain pen nib across rough paper- I think this effect was slightly too much and I will likely re-render it for use in future projects
After this, it was time to set up cameras to shoot the animation. I tried to shoot the pen as if I was shooting car drive-by or a plane fly-by to try and give it a sense of speed. and finished up with a shot to pull out and match the original logo giving us this:
Fluidity
Using a simple sphere as my source I can create a smoke sim that when rotated will imitate that of a drop of ink falling into water. I would later shade this the correct density and colour when It came to rendering in blender.
At the end of my network, I convert my smoke sim to an OpenVDB file format. This is a simulation cache format that I can then open in blender to render
Next I took the smoke sim into blender to render. I went for a crisp studio lighting with a white background.
I took this into After Effects and but the white text over the top so that it would only be revealed as the ink moved across the screen. I chose a Font called BD Caramel from Adobe. made by Swiss design studio "BURo Destruct". I chose it for its rounded soft corners and the slight flick on all of the curved finials.
The Final Result
