animated glossy buttons

[Michael Szalapski]

What do you mean when you say animated glossy buttons?
There are soooooo many different things you could want.

What do you mean when you say glossy? Do you mean a dark cool sheen, do you mean the Web 2.0 look, do you mean the Mac OSX look, or do you mean something else?

What do you mean when you say animated? Do you want the buttons moving around? If so, how? Do you want the “glossy” moving around? If so, how?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Gon Perdigao]

sorry i forgot the possibilities!
What i want is mac buttons.
And i want to animate the glossy, not the button it self.
Thanks a lot for the quick reply

[Michael Szalapski]

There is a tutorial here at the COW for making glossy text that would also work on a button.

I seem to recall back in the day a really goofy/fun way of making really shiny stuff happen. At the moment my AE machine is in the middle of a render for a client’s commercial that has to go out today otherwise I’d try it myself.

I seem to recall it being something like this.

Make your button shape.
On the button go to Effect>Generate>Ramp
Move the top and bottom parts of the gradient/ramp so the button goes from black to white (top to bottom)
Then Effect>Perspective>Bevel Alpha (you can play with these settings later)
Then Effect>Color Correction>Colorama and for the output color, choose one of the metallic options. If you then animate the output cycle, you get a really cool glossy look.
You can either change the colors with Effect>Color Correction>Hue/Saturation or you can actually change the colors in Colorama.

I’m not sure if that’s quite how it was, but it’s close.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Scott Novasic]

the plug in shade shape does an amazing job making ‘glossy’ buttons’ easy and with realism.

my 2 cents

SuperNova
Animation & Visual Effects
Scott Novasic
Los Angeles Ca
web:https://web.mac.com/finaleffects

[Todd Kopriva]

My first thought is to use layer styles.

Photoshop contains a lot of preset layer styles for glossy/glassy buttons. You can import a PSD file containing these layer styles into After Effects and then copy and paste the layer styles within After Effects. The page that I link to above contains a link to a tutorial here on the COW that shows how to do this.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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