Writing Letters

Valkier

I recently got picked up by a company as sort of a full time freelancer of sorts. I graduated this past December so I am a tad bit inexperienced still.

Anyways, my question is this:

I need to make a logo animation wherein a metal plate falls to the ground and then the initials of the company are kind of written into the steel. I haven't been able to figure out a good way of doing this however. I could easily make the effect to burn in the entirety of the letters all at the same time, but they seem dead set on having an invisible tool kind of weld the letters into the steel.

The programs at my disposal are Adobe Creative Suite, IE Photoshop, After Effects, etc. And 3DSmax.

I appreciate any advice or tutorials you guys might be able to offer. I have about a day to come up with something rough to show them and they either accept or decline the idea. I hope to hear something soon.

sir-knight

quick and dirty:

Draw or render 1 version of the plate that animates falling to the 'ground'

draw or render a 2nd version of the plate with the writing already done on it in the texture or whatever in the final resting frame of the 1st animation.

In after effects, use all kinds of animated brush strokes that follow the writing at the same time use that as a cutter to cut the unwritten plate to reveal the written plate underneath it.

Should be lots of AE tutorials on how to do a plasma cutter effect out there, the rest lies in your ability to animate with max and texture your steel plate.

Vailias

Couple ways I can think of doing it.
1: animated displacement map. Just make your logo into a grayscale image. Start with an all 50% gray image and create a number of further frames where your logo is revealed bit by bit in black. As the animation plays through the map will "carve" out the logo from the object it is applied to. Just be sure the poly density is high enough.

Other option, build in the logo from the start, and use some form of deformer/spacewarp to pull the logo geometry down in a carving/welding sort of manner.

There's likely several simpler ways in After Effects, but I have very little experience there.

Richard Kain

You're also going to want to include some particles. You can render these fairly easily in 3DSMax. Just have one version of the metal plate where you can hide everything except a particle emitter. Then just keyframe the emitter to move along the letters. Hide the plate and render the emitter animation as an animation with masking. Pop that into After Effects with the animations you've already rendered. It should look awesome.

You might also consider having some sort of welding "beam", although that sort of decision would probably be up to the client. With the tools you have at your disposal, the kind of animation you are describing is entirely possible.