...At Rooster Teeth Productions in Austin, Texas and we are a online media empire
that is responsible for a whole bunch of really stupid things.
We have an animated web series called Red vs. Blue. It's based on the video game
Halo, you may have heard of that. I've got an anime series called Ruby, other
2D productions like Camp Camp. We make stupid shorts, we have a series called
Million Dollars, But...., where we decide the most awful thing that you would do for
$1 million. "Would you accept $1 million if you could have puppet arms?" We had a
feature film we did a couple years ago for YouTube Red called Lazer Team. We have
broadcast productions, five days a week that we do podcasts out of our studio in
Austin. We do stupid things like seeing whether or not desk will break if you
dropkick them with our Games Department, Achievement Hunter, and Fun House.
And every once in a while, we decide to see whether you really do get a benefit
out of having a flaming basketball, like you do in NBA Jam. And a shout out to
Giphy because as I was doing all of my prep work, it was easier to go to Giphy
and search for Rooster Teeth GIFs than it was to dig up content on our server.
So there are about 260 of us at Rooster Teeth Productions and of those 260,
there are three of us that are responsible for all of the motion design work.
And so the thing that I want to talk to you about today is finding quick ways to
be able to turn around good design when you have a whole bunch of people that
you're trying to support. And so we're going to be talking about...you know,
when I'm doing visual effects work, I like to talk about it in the context of a magic
trick, in that as you're working on it, there's basic things that you need in the
shot to be able to sell that something happened and if you did your job in a good
way, you don't know that you were there and it's like magic. And I think design is
very similar in the same way, where if you spend some time upfront thinking about
what it is that you're doing, you can have some basic elements that kind of combine
together at the end to create a better thing. So I'm going to take you through a
couple of our projects that we've done in the past year or so and show you some
elements that, in ways, are very basic Cinema 4D, but then when you take them
through the comp process, end up being really cool. So before we do any of that,
let me show you a reel of some of the stuff that the motion design team does.
This is me and Justin Young, who is our motion designer broadcast, and Andre
Ouellette who's a motion designer in live action. So anyways, here is our reel.
♪ [music] ♪
So that is a little bit of the stuff that we do. So let's look at the first project
that we're going to talk about today. We have a game show that we produce
at Rooster Teeth called On The Spot and here is the opening for that show.
♪ [music] ♪
So there's a couple of key things that I want to talk about in this.
You know, the show has a very sort of retro set and they decided that they
wanted to use a lot of '60s op art patterns and, you know, these op art
things, if you were to try and create them in After Effects, you know,
they're 2D effects, but if you really kind of look at them, they're repeating
patterns on 3D objects. So if we go to...let's just go to the web and look at
some op art images. So, you know, if we look at these op art images,
they're always...they're very stark black and white and, you know,
they're repeating patterns and, you know, there are things that if you sort of look
at them are really just sort of basic 3D. So, you know, I mean that's basically a
sphere with repeating patterns on it, you know, that's some simple geometry.
You know, looking at this one, you know, that looks fairly complex, but
you know, in a way, I bet that's really just a tube with a couple deformers on it.
So why don't we just see if we can build that quick and we'll see what happens.
So let's go back into Cinema 4D and I'm just going to Create a Cube and let's go
ahead and make that taller and we'll go to Display and go to Gouraud Shading, just
so that we can see all of the extra segments. And I'm going to bump this up to
100 just so we have information. And we'll go into our Deformers and if we
add...let's go ahead and add a Twist. If we hold down Shift, it'll automatically
make it a child of our object. And now if we start to bring that up,
we got that. And if we go back and we look at this image, it looks like it's tapering
off into the distance. So if we go ahead and add another deformer and stick a
Taper in there. Tapers that off to the beginning and now sort of looks like we
have that shape if we go to the inside of it. So if we create a camera...and for my
friends on the Motion Design Slack, I'm going to change the lens from a 36
millimeter to something other than a 36 millimeter. We click here to go into our
fore view and then let's go find our camera and bring our camera in.
I'm going to just center that up and now we're going to rotate it.
Oh, you're looking down, we want to be looking up.
And you can already see that we're sort of starting to create the same look that's
in here and we just need to throw it some super simple textures. So,
you know, if we go in and, you know, we're very specifically...there's no shadowing
in any of this at all, so we're going to think about luminance textures instead of
color textures. So we'll turn off our color, turn on our luminance,
and there's all these awesome simple shaders that are built into Cinema 4D.
And let's go and we will use Checkerboard. And if we just throw that
on as a default texture, you know, maybe tile that up a bit and it starts to create
the look a little bit, that's not quite what we were looking for,
you know, we're looking to match up with that. So let's go ahead and go in here and
we'll adjust our Horizontal Frequency to zero and our Vertical Frequency to one,
so, basically, we just see that thing repeating vertically over and over
and over again. And now if we go in and reduce these to 1 and maybe 30,
now, all of a sudden, if we set some key frames, you know, just set that at the
beginning on our camera and then scroll up here and then maybe just sort of move
forward a little bit. You know, we already got a sort of basic look in there.
We're going to go into our Timeline and I'm going to adjust the camera and make
sure that it's just a constant move. And then why don't we go in while we're doing
that and just adjust the offset on our texture so we can create an animated look
on our texture too?
And go ahead and set that to linear too.
And now that looks pretty close to the original thing that we were trying to
create. You know, it's something that you could create in 2D, but if you think about
it in terms of 3D, it makes more sense to just sort of go over there and do that.
So the big thing that I was doing with this project, you know,
I knew that I needed to create a bunch of patterns and it made sense breaking down
the trick to go ahead and just create a whole bunch of different patterns that I
could then composite in After Effects and use just simple fades and other things on
to make it look more complex than it was, when it's really just a whole bunch of
assets that I'm sort of sandwiching together. We go into the folder,
the finished elements. You know, all of these are very simple.
So, you know, this is just a plane that's been subdivided, so there's a lot of
polygonal detail and then just a simple, like, noise deformer.
You know, if we go create a new project. Throw that 100, 100, throw a noise
deformer around there, Displacer. We won't do a lot of work on this one.
But, you know, if we scale that up, you know, all of a sudden we've got,
you know, some information in there. And then, let's use one of the other pattern
services that are in Cinema 4D. Another one that I use a lot that actually has way
more flexibility than you expect is this Tile one. And so... By the way,
if you don't use it, always go into the help, because there's so many cool things
that are in there. Like, you know, this, if you click help inside of the
Pattern, it'll bring up an image of all the different sort of textures that you
can create in there and a lot of these are very similar to some of the other op art
patterns that we were looking at. So, you know, being able to come in here and,
you know, throw some circles on...so let's choose one of the circles and change your
colors to white.
And then, a lot of times, I'll just switch over to the Layer and add a just camera
correction, just to be able to kind of crunch all the blacks in there.
And, you know, now if we throw that on there and we scale that down...it's maybe
a little too much, let's go 5, 5. You know, we've got our dot pattern.
And so, you know, we took all of those assets and we made these individual cards.
So like with the spot one, you know, that's four iterations with just various
blend modes in After Effects, but, you know, if I take those into Premiere and
I'm just wiping across them, all of a sudden, you know,
this is really just those four cards, but scaled up in different ways and swap
between things. And it's a very simple thing, but it comes together and it starts
to look like something that's more complex.
The other thing that I want to talk about in this project is the thing that we call
The Diddle Finger. So if I were to animate this in After Effects,
you know, there's a couple of different ways that I do. I could create a
composition that just has the arm and pre-comp that and then maybe use puppet
pins to bend that into shape. And there's a couple of other plugins that have been
created for moving things along a spline like that, but it's kind of convoluted to
be able to do that. But in Cinema 4D, it has a really super-easy to use spline
wrap and so we can very easily go in and create this sort of complex animation.
So I'm going to break down a shot that ended up not being in the open, but that I
think does a really great example of how to do that. So here's the second shot that
we're going to take a look at. You know, it was a really simple build on and then
we had this sort of sweep that comes across. Note the arm kind of weaving its
way around the circles. So one of the things that I do, you know,
we want to sort of try and maintain as much flexibility as we can while we're
working because we have very short turnarounds for a lot of these projects.
This On The Spot open was something that we had about a week to turn around. Well,
we had other projects going on and it was sort of one-and-a-half people that were
working on the project. And so, I built all of these sort of layouts in
Illustrator. And let me open up that file because I could send this graphic over as
an example of what the layout would be and there's a great tool that if you have the
Maxon Service Agreement and have a Cineversity account, there's these great
plugins called CD Tools that do all sorts of things. Cineversity PlaneSmart
is particularly cool. Cineversity ArtSmart is the one that we're going to
use right now, but ArtSmart is going to allow us to just copy all of these things.
We can just copy and go into cinema 4D and let's create a new project.
Paste and there's all of our files right there. So we can go ahead and build out
that scene just out of all of that stuff. Actually, before I do anything else,
I'm going to go and reset the origin of all of this stuff and then create a camera
and I'm going to stick the camera at zero, zero, zero.
And if we back out, you know, now we've got the layout that's basically the same
as this layout. So, you know, there's a couple of things that are going on here
and it's not super complex. So we've got a handful of these circles that are inside
one cloner and a handful that are not in the cloner, so if we very quickly do
that. Let's grab a couple of random... Okay. And now if we come over here
with those selected and click Group Objects, it'll stick those into one.
I'm just going to hide them for a second so I can select my other ones.
And I'll just quickly group those and while I'm thinking about it,
I will label those and label these and then I will label this My Finger Path.
Okay, so now if we stick these into a Mograph Cloner...
And then set that to Hierarchical.
Oh, no, sorry, Extrude, not a Cloner. Sorry about that. And then,
get that back on again. So we're actually...we don't want to extrude these
at all really, we just kind of want them to be...we'll stick it at one,
keep them basically flat and then we'll stick these inside of our Extrude too,
stick them to Hierarchical. So one of the things I did in here is I made these
red and I made these green and I made those two colors specifically because it's
very easy for me to pull a matte in After Effects from those colors.
So when I render this file out, I left the Alpha channel on, so this is
really...think of this black as transparent and so I can get a matte that
I can pull out of that, but I can also isolate these red and green because in the
final shot, I used those to create masks that I could put the patterns that I
showed you before into this same shot and you're adding extra layers of detail into
it. And so, you know, I had all of these various assets that I could use over and
over and over again, and by creating these mattes, you know, I could use them in a
different way than I'd used them in the other shots. So let's go ahead and we will
set up. We're going to stick these inside of a fracture object which allows you to
use Mograph Deformers with these cloners that you've set up.
And so, I'm going to set this to Explode Segments & Connect, which turns all of
those into little separate pieces that I can play with. I'm going to create another
Fracture, stick them in. So let's call that Circle One.
And again, this is super basic Mograph, but if we go in here and we just do a
Shader effector, and we're going to go in and we're going to set this to negative
one, make sure position and rotation and everything else are off, and now if we go
in here with a... I like to use Box. You could also use Linear. I'm just going to
scale that up big enough so that it can fill up the shot and as I move that on,
it is going to move those pieces. But I haven't hit Explode Segments & Connect.
Well, actually, there, you can see the difference. So if I leave it straight,
I can still effect all of those things with the shader, but if I do Explode
Segments & Connect, if I go in here now...if I go back to Fracture Object,
Explode Segments & Connect, now, as I move that shader across,
it's going to effect all of them individually. So if I set my keyframe here
and then come forward a little bit to there. Let's play that back and see what
happens. So super simple. And then go back into the same one and I'm going to
add... I use this Delay effector all the time to just add a little bit of
springiness to something. I'm always trying to sort of remove as much,
like, digital simple animation as I can. And so, you know, as soon as we add that
delay, now there's a little bit of spring when it lands. So now,
let's go ahead and we're just going to take those two connectors and we'll
duplicate them and now we will drag those in here and just go in and adjust our
keyframes a little bit.
So if we offset those… Now we've got two simple animations that are going on and
we're kind of making all of those randomly pop on. Let's go and set up our shaders
quickly, so turn off Color, Luminance, add green, add red.
We'll just drop those on the Fracture. And that's set up.
So now the only other thing we want to do is our hand animation.
So if we go in, I set up the hand ahead of time. I'm going to go into Luminance
again because I don't care about my shading.
So this is probably not the way to label your files, but as I was working on it,
I discovered that I needed longer and longer hands to wrap around the splines,
so we've got our Spline, our Longer Hand for Spline, Even Longer Hand for
Spline, Yet Even Longer Hand for Spline. Let's go with just the normal
Hand for Spline. So there is another great CV tool that lets you import this
with proper card size and automatically drops the image onto the card,
but we're just going to do it the old-fashioned way. And when you're import
that in, it's going to show you the resolution right here, so 5904 by 200
allows us to say, "Okay, well, if we want that to map properly onto the card,
we'll just go in here and type 5904," not 5094. And I care more about width segments
this time than height, so really, I can have one height segment and as long as I
have... I don't know, let's set it to 600 and set to Z. And now we've got our
hand, but it's going the wrong way so I'm just going to set it to negative one
and then negative one.
And then I got to go back in here and it's got Alpha setup so we're going to
just copy my channel by right-clicking.
And now that's set up. And so, all we need to do to be able to animate this is to
create a spline wrap. So we go in here and click Spline Wrap and then we've got our
spline that we just pasted it in from Illustrator down here. All we do is drag
that and then we can rotate this into...
In position. And this is actually a little wide, so I'm going to set that to...
My mouse stopped working. Oh, there we go.
Okay, so let's set that back to 100 and I'm going to set the repetitions to 1.
Why did that break? Okay. Anyway, so now if we go in here, if we just do Offset,
so if we come... So we've got our circles coming in, the other circles built in and
then we want to have our arm come in about here. So we'll just go to...
I'll set it to negative 100, which is going to make it all the way off camera,
and once we adjust our camera, you won't be able to see that anymore.
And then we'll set it to zero, set another keyframe, and all of a sudden,
we've got, you know, it's a relatively basic animation that doesn't look basic.
So as I was building up assets for that project...and I can show you some of the
other hands that we created for that thing. [inaudible] So here's a bunch
of those finger shapes.
And all those are just made from super basic things. So, you know,
if I were to go in here and create Helix and drop that in the Spline
Wrap, you know, now we've got a wrapping around the spline. And so,
when you need to iterate, being able to do that and just drop another spline on it
completely change your animation, makes it super handy. So the other project that I
want to break down today is a transition that we did for...we have a show that we
produce in our ScrewAttack brand called Death Battle and we did some rebranding
recently for that and I wanted to break down this transition that we did for that
open. Again, this is one of those things where we had a very short amount of time
to be able to do all this stuff. And, you know, another thing that I spent a lot
of time doing is using photos for textures and then not... I mean,
avoiding building geometry whenever possible. There's some really great tools
that are built into 4D for, you know, making these photos look a lot more
realistic than they potentially could. So there's a great resource that I use,
called textures.com, that's used a lot in the game industry.
There are these textures were you can sign up and you get,
like, 15 credits a day and you can go download a bunch of stuff.
And so, I knew I was going to need sort of a...they were talking about a very gritty
industrial look and I knew that I needed to create a door opening.
And I started building a 3D door and it just wasn't feeling like I wanted it to,
so I went and dug through and I was looking for a bunch of reference.
Good, when I checked the other day, the door that I used was on the front page and
now it's not, so... But, you know, there's all these really cool things that,
like, if you were to build them from scratch, you could, but it would take you
a lot longer. And if you can sell a photo as a real thing, it doesn't matter if you
build it anyways. So, you know, if you do some sort of simple
techniques, you can take that apart and make it look more or less realistic.
So one of the things I'm going to talk about is specifically how I went in and
added the logo and all the other information to this door. So if we go back
and look at the door itself... So I downloaded that photo and I brought it
into Photoshop.
So here's the basic door. You know, I went in and I kind of carefully cut out these
various elements and created the background and just separated everything
into all of its various little bits, saved that out. And let's look into the file
itself. So if we look at the scene, we basically took our individual cards and
they're doing a very basic animation where they sort of slam in.
And then I've got some wind deformers set up that... If you just normally apply
a wind deformer, you know, it's a very sort of cheesy effect, you know,
you throw that on there and now, oh, we have our waving polygon. But a couple of
versions of the C4D ago, they did this cool thing where they
added falloff effectors to all of the deformers and I kind of wanted to create
this sort of a matrix-cy metal ripple look and I realized that I could use the Wind
Deformer to be able to do that. And so, you know, these Wind Deformers are just
set up with, you know, basic Box Falloff and as you go in, you know,
these doors slam in and then the box just ripples across it, you know.
And you sort of looked like setting up some sort of a
soft body simulation, but it's just the deformer kind of ramping across it.
It's that same cheesy wind effect. But in the context, you know,
that starts to become a more complex information...I mean, animation.
So I went in and I set up my basic. Let's take a look at the shader and break down
the shader a little bit. So I brought in, I'm using the color information and
then... Nope, this one doesn't have it. So here's the basic color information.
So I loaded in that file and one of the cool things that I didn't know until
recently is that if you click into a PSD that you load in, you can actually choose
which layer you want from your layer set. So here are all of my layers from the PSD,
which is super awesome because it means you don't have to save out multiple files
for everything.
So, I mean, that's definitely one of those things that when we're working very
fastly, being able to save one PSD and go back and make changes to that and we save,
you can just reload image and have it reload back in again, is really,
really cool. So we take that, we copy, we've got just that information set up and
then I copy that shader. A lot of times what I'll do is I'll set up my first
shader and then copy and paste every other shader that I'm working on.
So if I go in there and I go down to my Normal... I don't know if a lot of people
know that there's a normalizer that's built into Cinema 4D, and so,
you know, I can paste, so let's go ahead and paste that. We'll copy the shader and
we'll go in and paste it. And now once we've loaded it in, if we switch it over
to the Normalizer, which is under Effects, it's going to keep that photo
image. And now, scale that up. Now it's calculating normals out of that image and
all of a sudden, all of the lights that we add to the scene are going to reflect off
of that normal information.
So, you know, there's a couple of different methods condensed,
this is going to be the fastest and lightest. A lot of times I end up using
Sobel 4X. I don't understand the technical differences, but I feel like Sobel ends up
giving me sort of a better look most of the time. And then we'll go in and set up
our Alpha from the same image. It's going to be able to extract the Alpha
information from that PSD. And then I also went in and I set up my logos and,
you know, one of the nice things about building... So if we go back and look at
this finished version, you know, we see the logos on there, we see that there's
some rust information that's coming through, you know, you can see some
sort of...all of this shadowing in here is specifically from the normal that we
created. And I could build this out in Photoshop but the nice thing about keeping
all of these things separate... And if we look at the way the textures are set up,
you know, we've got our base layer here and then we've got the blood part of our
logo out here. We've got the white set up as its own thing and then I'm going to
show you how you can bring the rust information back. So if we take...
Let's just delete this for a second.
So here's that shader set up with the logo added separately. And the other reason
that we add the logo separately is because it allows us to set up different
reflections for all of those elements. If you assume that the kinds of paint that
are going to be on that door would be different and would reflect differently,
if you were to set that up as just a Photoshop graphic, you wouldn't have any
of that stuff separated and so you couldn't have separate settings for every
one of those things. But if you set up Alphas, you can just keep dropping more
and more shaders on top of your geometry and make it more complex.
So I have a problem here. I see the logo, but I don't see the rust information and I
want to see the rust come back up. So, you know, there's a fairly simple way we can
do that. So let's go in here, we're just going to duplicate our shader. Actually,
let's do it on door right.
So if we copy this shader now...and now we don't want the Alpha information from the
graphic, we want the Alpha information from the luminance. So we're going to just
kind of go in here and let's just clear it out and we'll paste what we copied.
And so now, if we go to...switch this to Layer and come in, if we just start
messing with brightness and contrast and hue and saturation. So let's desaturate it
first and then let's go in and we're just going to start adjusting the Gamma and
the Contrast to really kind of bring out those black bits that are in there.
If you right-click and click Open Window...I only learned this recently too.
Like, a lot of times I want to work on a bigger version of the texture preview
instead of that little square that's right there and it's a super easy way to
kind of be able to work on a bigger canvas and see what you're doing.
So here's the version that I set up on my own ahead of time. If we go into that
Alpha, you can see that I just used sort of all those settings to just kind of
create a very contrasting thing. And what that does is now... Actually,
let's set that to Flat and it should update. I'm going to close it,
reopen. Anyways, what it does is now we're starting to pull all of those elements
back. And because it's set to Alpha, as soon as we drop that on the right
door...and the nice thing is we still have those normal set up,
so it's just going to stack it, like, if you think about it in terms of Photoshop
layer, as you're moving to the right, it's sort of like a layer is on top of the next
layer on top of the next layer. And so, you know, all of this information, it's
just adding great little tiny bits of detail. And none of this stuff is modeled.
This is all just from various graphics and photo reference. And so
being able to turn something around where it looks like it's supposed to look, but I
didn't have to build it, means that we can work in a faster way.
So some of the other things going on in the scene, one of the things that I really
believe in is using GOBOs on area lights. So you can create an area light
and... Let's just create a simple little box. So, you know, your normal area light,
set that up, let's go in and we'll set Falloff to Inverse Square, and you
bring that up, create some area shadows. You know, I mean, it's a light and then
it's not that exciting, but if you throw a GOBO on it, you can,
in a lot of ways, fake global illumination, because if you have an image
that has a lot of the colors that you have in your scene... So let's look at this.
So, you know, this image, the original door had a lot of kind of greens
in it, but I knew that I needed to set the scene to be sort of purple.
You know, if I take this graphic and just sort of bring it in...
And there's another CV tool that I haven't used a lot, but I need to use more of,
where it actually allows you to import the image directly to a GOBO and it'll create
a light and throw the image onto the light.
But we'll do it the other way.
So now, if we throw that onto the Transparency and then throw that onto
our light... Well, you're also going to want to blur it. So if you go in here,
adjust 30, 40, maybe 60, you know, all of a sudden, we start to create some sort of
more interesting stuff and let me duplicate that out.
You know, and you can start to kind of find the colors in your scene and keep
dropping them on over and over and over again. So, you know, we basically got that
set up here where I created a couple of different little color patterns and really
just took that same image and used filter to change the colors and create a whole
bunch of different lights that just have... Again, I'm always trying to add
more little bits of information and using something like an image means that the
color of light that's shooting out from that area light is just going to be a lot
more interesting than a bare, sort of single color light. You can do lots of
other things with Transparency. If you didn't want to use an image,
you could set up some crazy noise patterns and there's a lot of really interesting
things you can do. So before we wrap up, I want to show you one other project.
So one of my ongoing projects is a channel called Let's Play and they play
video games and they talk over the video games.
It's a big thing on YouTube. And sort of my version of a daily,
there was a decision when we relaunched the channel that we were going to try and
have a unique Let's Play bumper for every video and it's kind of become an
awesome thing.
And if you can find a project at work that's very similar to this,
we had to keep doing more and more and more bumpers. And so anytime we needed to
create something, I have a set of design rules for what I need to do, but there's
no direction on what that thing needs to be. And so one of the projects that I
did... Actually, let's go back to the reel. You know, I've done a whole bunch
of these things, but the one that I want to kind of talk about as we're talking
about textures is this disco ball here.
I started trying to think about how to put together a disco
ball in Cinema 4D and I thought about using a cloner and maybe trying to take
our Let's Play logo shape and, you know, maybe taking some little squares.
And that was getting very heavy, very quick in terms of geometry and getting all
of these to sort of map onto this logo in a way that was going to be dense enough
and in the same pattern was not happening. And so very quickly,
I got to the point where I realized, you know what? This probably is something that
I should do as a texture instead. And so, let's go take a look at those textures
quickly because they're kind of cool.
So here's the base texture for that image. We just went into Photoshop and set up a
row of blocks and kind of just duplicated those rows and offset them and,
you know, as we offset them, we kind of just built up this disco ball pattern.
And then brought that into that normalizer that I showed you and created a normal
pattern. And so we're very quickly able to kind of take that pattern here and once
we've got normals, once it's mapped onto the logo, you can see that it's kind of
faking the geometry of all of those little bits of detail. And then one of the things
that I was trying to solve...so one of the things that you can't do in Cinema 4D yet
or any other program for that matter that I know of, is being able to have these
light beams bouncing back. You can set up a light that's volumetric, but to be able
to have a light hit that disco ball and then bounce back the way… Disco ball was a
very difficult thing to do.
And so I had a thought that if I took that same pattern that I created here and
then brought it into After Effects and created a pattern where I just used
Fractal Noise to kind of flicker on and off, that when I went into comp,
I could render out a separate pass of that disco ball that just had all of those
basic... Again, taking the same image, but mapping that texture onto it,
I could use that as a map to be able to drive [inaudible] or shine
to send those rays back. And it's using 3D and 2D at the same time for the things
that are appropriate for the job, which is like I can go into 3D and take that
texture and map it onto the geometry and have it moving around my camera and be
able to bring those things back into After Effects. It will be a very difficult thing
to set up on its own in After Effects, but when you're using the two applications
together, all of a sudden... Again, going back to the magic trick analogy,
it doesn't matter how I accomplished it, it looks like there's rays bouncing back
off the logo.
So if we go look at the scene itself. So this is another one of those photo
reference things. So one of my first jobs when I got to Rooster Teeth,
we have a show called Red vs. Blue and a lot of it is done in the game itself,
but we started adding more and more 3D animation. You know, we needed to build
out levels that looked...or sets that looked very similar to the levels in the
game. And so one of my first jobs was sort of flying around in the levels
looking for textures that I thought were interesting. I kind of jokingly called it
Texture Farming. It was like one of the most soothing things in the world is
sort of flying around and looking at all the things that you don't ever pay
attention to when you're playing and we would take those textures and we would
clean them up in Photoshop and then we would bring them in and we would chop them
up and just using the Knife Tool, kind of extrude these things into simple geometry.
And so this is one of those things where, you know, I had this photo of a club or
a gymnasium and I just kind of used the knife to cut out the doors here and move
them back and created some, like, really simple cards very quickly. But let's look
at the disco ball itself. So anyway, you can see that…you know,
if we go in here and just adjust the size. I