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Glowing / Sparkle Neon Block Text technique?
Hi Guys,
Just wondering if anyone has any good methods for creating a text treatment in After Effects similar to this:
>> The above is an animated gif that ‘should’ loop so refresh browser to see it play.
1) The shimmer treatment – It’s a block/cube based highlight/shimmering.
I’ve got a few ideas involving Trapcode Star Glow/AE Glow effect, and maybe some masks, but any other thoughts or techniques would be awesome.
2) The letters Second part of the treatment problem is how to make those little boxes (that the letters are made up of) taper/adapt to the edges such that only complete boxes are used. If I were to overlay a pixel-based grid then the squares would simply get their corners etc chopped of.
The video that this example is drawn from is here:
@4:27
Thanks!
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4 Replies
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regarding #2: Start with CC Ball Action applied to the letter.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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Thanks Todd. That’s the perfect starting tip that I was after.
This jumbotron tutorial from John Dickinson also might be quite useful.
https://motionworks.net/after-effects-jumbotron-column/
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I ended up achieving a great result (see below GIF) through the following workflow:
1. 3D Text was created using Element 3D. The After Effects built in Glow plugin was applied to the element layer to give a subtle neon styled glow.
2. CC Ball Action was applied to a text layer to create the LED jumbotron-like text. I had to play with the ball size and spacing, as well as the text tracking and size to achieve the correct allocation of balls to make up the letters. Bigger and fewer balls means less accurate wrapping of the balls to the letters (seems to work off an established grid). The text also has a bit of the Glow plugin applied to it such that you end up with little glowing balls. In fact, for the most part, modifying the colour (Colour A and B) within the Glow effect on this layer was what I used to change the colour for other words.
3. I then needed to set up some animated variation in the brightness of these balls so that later on when we use Trapcode Starglow, the variations in brightness would cause a sparkling effect. To do this I created a solid layer and applied the Fractal Noise effect. I wanted nice small blocks so these were my settings, but change it to suit your project:
I then used this layer as a Luma Matte above the text-ball layer so that it would essentially eat away at the text.
4. Above these layers I created an Adjustment Layer and applied Trapcode Starglow with these settings:
5. As I wanted the sparkle to sweep over my text from left to right, I animated a mask over this adjustment layer. A slight bit of feather (20pix?) can help take the sharpness off the mask edge.
6. We want the ball text to be glowing the whole time, and then sparkle as the sweep passes over. The noise layer is affecting everything in the comp so I duplicated the original layer containing the glowing ball text, placed it above the adjustment layer, and then copied the mask that is on the adjustment layer and applied it the duplicated text layer. However I inverted the mask on this new text layer (you could perhaps used subtract mode also?) so that this text was being masked out by the mask while the adjustment layer below it (Starglow) was being masked on.
7. I then placed this pre comp on top of my Element 3D pre comp and that was pretty much the technique.
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