Animated Indiana Jones Travel Arrow

[John Cuevas]

I’ve had to recreate that effect in the past and the way I’ve always done it is to create my own globe, using a flat map, animating the red line then bringing it into a new comp and using CCSphere. That’s much easier than trying to match to the time of video.

If you are locked into using video, I’d still go about it much the same way, but it would require some finese. Make a large comp, 2000×500 and create black solid. Use a mask and apply a stroke, animate the end point to give yourself a reference.

Drop this comp onto the globe footate. Apply the CCSphere effect, change the radius to match globe, set the rotation to match globe. Next, use Add transfer, unmult or a shift channel effect to overlay this stroke on to the globe.

Finally, open up the original comp in a second window and add vertexes and adjust the keyframes so the line will move as you need.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[David Bogie]

Using the Render setting in CC Sphere it is possible to place one sphere object inside another as long as the layers are different scales. They are flat layers, remember, not 3D. You’re just stacking them in order:
Top layer is the travel line set to render outside.
Next layer is the surface of the world to which you have applied CCSphere.
Bottom layer is another copy of your travel arrow set to render inside. You may not need this layer unless you want to show the arrow wrapping aournd behind the globe. You can feather a mask iat the edges of the globe layer to enhance the illusion that there is atmosphere.

an expression links all rotation together, modifying the expression for the arrow layers by multiplying by a number slightly greater than one will enhance the illusion of separation between the objects.

One more thing that everyone who animates globes screws up: The Earth rotates west to east. The sun rises on the eastern seaboard of the US before it rises in California. (PBD GlobeTrekker series has their entire logo, opens, closes and credits using a globe that is spinning backwards, idiots.)

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Rc Maples]

John,

Thanks for your reply. The flat map and CCSphere effect did the trick.

I took it one step further and suspended my newly created globe in Space. Using the skybox tutorial on the AE Podcasts section, I took a fractal image and made the starmap, after rendering it on the inside of a sphere and taking it’s radius larger than the globe’s radius I had some fun.

In the tut he speaks of using a 3D enabled layer to move a camera around, and locking the star maps position to that of the camera in 3d space. This method was not working for me as when I turned my globe precomp into a 3D enabled layer, it was still just the flat version, not providing me with the rotation aronud the globe I needed. After reading up on expressions and thinking threw it for a moment I came up with the following…:
Simulate a 3D Camera move in space by using the CC Sphere’s rotation and radius properties to replace pan/tilt/zoom.

After getting the Globe to spin in the direction and speed desired, it was time to make the star map move appropriately.

I tied the starmap’s ccsphere rotation props to the rotation props on globe. The result was the desired “camera move” simulating an orbital view of the globe and traversing journey.

Link: https://www.rcmaples.net/files/globe.mov (h.264 qt7) The QT file is a little darker and you can’t see the stars, but the full res is fine.

Lemme know your thoughts 🙂

—
Doobie Doobie Doo
beware the penguins

[John Cuevas]

Like it a lot—I’m going to have to use the rotating starfield, that looks pretty cool. LOL-I’ve watched it like 5 times, really really like tieing the starfield to the planet rotation-dang why didn’t I think of that.

Glad I could help

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[Slayton Shaw]

Rob,

Saw your post here from several years ago. I am pulling out what little hair I have left trying to do what you did for The Aquarium.

Is there any chance you could share with me the After Effects file you created. I do not want the graphics or any proprietary artwork, just the .aep file.

Drop me a line back here or email me at scshaw2@gmail.com.

Thank you.

[Rc Maples]

Slayton,
Got your call, forgiveness for the delay in response.

For the arrow itself, I used a flat map of the world that would look nicely when ‘orbed’ and took it into photoshop. Inside PS, I drew each element in layers. So there’s layer for each city’s name, a layer for the red line, and a layer for the red dots to mark waypoints.

Now, import the composite into AFX as it’s own composition. Animate the line layer, the dot layer, and the name layers to get the desired effect. I used a combination of transparency key framing and zoom keyframing to make the names and dots ‘pop’ as they were hit. (I think I did that on this animation, if not I should have lol.)

To animate the line, I believe I used a linear wipe transition or animated a mask via a path to wipe across the line in the order I needed. Get your timing set, then animate the dots and city names to match.

This leaves us with a nice flat map with an animated line. From there it’s to the tutorials! I found a tutorial, I thought on the Cow, detailing how to make a skybox(?) (check the CC podcasts from Mr. Aaron Rabinowitz). The tutorial walks you through creating a field of stars using fractal generator(I think), then wrapping the previous map comp into a sphere and setting the movement of that sphere to correspond with the movement of the star field, so if either change position the other changes as well, relative to the first movement. The end result is a field of stars that rotate with the map-globe and give the illusion of seeing it from space as you travel around the globe. This is much more realistic than just having a flat un-animated field of stars behind your moving globe.

That is the basic gist of how I did the map for the Aquarium. Forgive me for being so vague, but I did that animation a looong time ago. I’ve done another using a flat map of the state of Georgia to detail a particular route needed to get from point A to point B. That one was much simpler, as I just drew a path using the pin tool along the route taken. Once the path was drawn, I gave it a stroke and animated the stroke along the path with the timing needed. Add in a couple of pop-up waypoint markers and it was good to go.

—
Doobie Doobie Doo
beware the penguins

[Slayton Shaw]

RC,

Appreciate your response. Your workflow sounds like something that I can tackle. I’ll look up the skybox tutorial and give it a try.

Thank you,
SC