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Creating Ice Surface like in NBC Olympics
I love the look of the reflective ice that NBC has done for the Winter Olympics. I have some ideas how to get started, but sure would appreciate the help. Thanks in advance for your time.
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2 Replies
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Hi Mark –
It looks to me as if 3D was used for the reflective ice, at least that would be the easiest way to do it, what with the extruded text, ice blocks with icons in them, etc. that they’re using. My guess would be that it’s just a plane in a 3D program with a real photograph of an ice surface mapped to it, then set to a reflectivity that would match ice, or better yet, look good. It appears that the falloff of the reflections is not realistic, but it does look really nice.
My guess is that you could do it in AE (just the ice, of course), but the amount of time would be astronomical compared to doing it in, say, 3D Studio Max. Setting up the ice surface would take no time in Max, and the extruded text is simple. The “cubes” appear to be pretty much identical, so you’d only have to model one, then replace the interal icons as needed. In AE, I’d create the ice surface with a photo of an ice surface, then use Andrew Kramer’s killer preset, Easy Reflect:
https://www.videocopilot.net/presets/quick_3d_reflections/
Thanks to VideoCopilot, the reflection process has become a whole lot easier and controllable without having to write your own expressions.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
There’s also Reflector from Zaxwerks. It’s not free, but it works with AE’s 3d space really well and is quite amazing.
You might also check out this tutorial for some ice ideas.
A quick google search turns up some good COW stuff in the first few links.
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