Carving name in ice

[Justin Productions]

Short answer: Zaxwerks Invigorator 3D plug-in.

For everything else, there’s Mastercard.

Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional

[David Bogie]

Depends on what you need it to look like. I’d use Shatter to create the spraying ice particles and Particle Systems to create a secondary, directional shower or particles.
There’s no reason to buy Zax and spend a few months learning how to use it if you don’t need it. But if you need to create a sculpture that looks like ice, hire a 3D animation artist. You need to know how to light 3D extrusions and work with refraction indexes. You’re also looking at some interesting render times.

bogiesan

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

[Jack Hilkewich]

If you can create text in photoshop that looks like ice,(there are tons of actions to download at the Adobe Exchange Studio and I think there are some that do make text look like ice)

Then make the name like you want it. Duplicate the layer. Then using the clone tool just make a solid block of ice that same size as your name.

save those two layers as separate .tiffs then import them into after effects. Line them up so the solid covers the text. Then use the particle effect to create the ice chips as they fly off of the chisel. animate the placement of that to reveal the texts as youd like.

Using animated masks to do the actual reveal just make it match the particle movement.

Try using different shapes for particles there are shard looking ones I think you can even use the text layer so it will give the particles their color. (coloured polygon is the setting I think)