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Creating Glaciers
Hi Guys,
OK, here is the situation. We are doing some work on an animated map, and one of the effects we want is a bunch of glaciers covering most of the map then splitting apart and melting away from their boarders inwards (roughly like they actually did over the period of a thousand years (though our little show will hopefully not last that long..)). Rather than straight boarders, it would be nice to have some texture as they melt.
Any ideas or tutorials come to mind?Thanks in advance,
Tim
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11 Replies
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I am assuming that this is a 2d map. The easiest way I can think of is to make your initial glacier map and then break it up into multiple pieces/layers that make up the whole. You can use masks to achieve this. That way, you can make any rough edges you want. Simply animate the masks over time to “shrink” the glaciers and give the illusion of the glaciers breaking up over time and melting inward.
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In one composition, create a grayscale map of your glaciers where black will be the glacial areas that melt first and white will be those that last longest. My suggested method for this is to paint out the general map in Photoshop with a soft brush and dodge/burn it into the shape you want, then import this into AE and place it above a solid layer with Fractal Noise applied at a low contrast (50) and change its blending mode to Hard Light. This should give you a sufficiently detailed grayscale map.
Now bring this composition into a new composition and create a ‘glacier’ layer. This layer will be the color of your glaciers, so make it sufficiently icy looking (some fractal noise? light blue? dirty in parts?) then apply Distort > CC Blobbylize to the ‘glacier’ layer. Set the Blob Layer to your grayscale composition and animate the Cut Away.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Here’s something I did with the above technique in a few minutes:
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Thanks for the tips, sounds like what we’re looking for.
Cheers,
Tim
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Hey Darby,
That looks fantastic! You make it sound so easy, I hope I can get mine to look as good.
Thanks so much,Tim
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Hey Darby,
Is there any chance you would share the AE Project file for what you did to create those glaciers? I’m a newbee with AE and can’t quite follow your instructions.
Thanks so much,
Tim
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Sure, but I won’t be able to get it to you until Monday. I’ll post a link to it here on Monday.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
That’s great, I’m looking forward to it.
Best,
Tim -
The file is up at:
https://www.darbsandaly.com/aep/Glaciers.zip
I encourage you to look at the two pre-comps in the AEP, one of them is the color/texture of the glaciers and the other is the height map used for ‘melting’ the glaciers. I painted some very basic black and white areas in AE for the general shape of the melt, then blurred it, changed its transfer mode to ‘Hard Light’ and put it above a layer with fractal noise on it to get a more detailed height map. Remember that black disappears first as you animate the ‘Cut Away’ property of CC Blobbylize.
You’ll need CS3 to open this AEP, I apologize but I don’t have any older versions available to me here.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Thanks Darby,
That’s awesome. AE is new for me I’m more of an audio post guy…so if there is anything I can help you out with at that end please let me know.Cheers,
Tim
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