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Creating a moving specular highlight
Hi,
Using ProAnimator, I’m looking to create a moving specular highlight, a glint if you will, across static text. The text is polished metal, and by the end of the animation, is static having reached its final pose. I then want to create a moving specular highlight across (from left to right) the flat face of the text. The camera is static throughout the animation.
I’ve heard talk of Proanimator’s ability to offset the reflection map – can the map’s position be keyframed over time? What about using a .mov as the map? I think this would be difficult to sync in time wrt the overall animation.
Thanks for your ideas.
Brandon
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6 Replies
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Hi Brandon,
You have lots of options. You’ll have the most flexibility using ProAnimator inside of After Effects. Doing so will allow you to use the layermap offset option you talked about. As a very easy alternative, you could also use the Werks from Zaxwerks to create a really cool gradient light sweeps, glints and glows. You didn’t say whether you have After Effects – but it really opens up lots of opportunities.
If you use ProAnimator as a stand alone app, you can also use a movie in the reflection map channel in the material editor. You can control when the effects move by changing the length of your movie.
One last option – maybe your video editing app has light sweep effects you could apply to the logo movie.
Does this help?
Jon
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Not sure if this would work for you, but I had a similar problem. I wasn’t happy with mapping a reflection image (there’s a tutorial on motionworks I believe)
So what really worked well for me was to “twist the Y axis” slightly for each character at the same time. It caught the reflection nicely and because it was only a slight “twist”, the letters looked pretty good.
You can check it out here:
https://www.divshare.com/download/3610935-760
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Hi Jay,
I’ve done that on occasion too. Movement as little as plus/minus 3 degrees is enough. Be sure to use ease to keep the motion smooth.
Jon
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Here’s the link to the reflection map offset tutorial:
https://www.motionworks.com.au/?p=172JD
John Dickinson
Motionworks
http://www.motionworks.com.au -
Nicely done, JD.
Jon
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Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I don’t have AE, so I’ve been using ProAnimator stand-alone – I had no idea how much more flexible it is as plug-in. The fact the output of the plug-in is key-framed animated 3d objects instead of a pre-rendered image is incredibly powerful.
John D, great tutorials!
Things I’d like to see in the next PA:
– poseable lights
– soft shadows
– more basic modelers, like lathing
– more flexible texture mapping (ability to position map, scale map, change mapping type, etc.)
– raytrace render engine w/ true reflectionsBrandon
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