How do I create a 3D animation from a 2D Illustrator Sphere made up of dots without using CC Sphere?

[Matthew Keane]

Without seeing the logo, it’s hard to say exactly what will work. My first thoughts were, ermm, CC Sphere and then Trapcode Form, if you have the plug-in and want a lot of dots to make up your sphere.

If the logo is simpler, with the 3D aspect suggested by dots of different sizes, you might be able to recreate it by importing the elements separately, and then placing them in z-space, which might allow a slight camera move to give the impression of a 3D sphere, but that’s going to be fiddly to set up and not entirely convincing (you’re not going to be able to orbit all the way around it).

If you have CS5, then the Freeform plugin, and a gradient map, would allow you to deform a flat image into something a bit more spherical, which would react to lights.

[Kevin Camp]

aescripts.com has a script that may help you:

https://aescripts.com/create3dshapes/

you just select a bunch of layers and run a script to form them into a sphere… what i don’t know is if it will arrange them in a way that looks like your logo.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Frank Feijen]

Maybe having them all face automatically to the camera might help?

[Sean Heywood]

Gentlemen I want to thank you for your input. I appreciate all of the suggestions and welcome as much advice on this post. Here is the logo just so you have a greater understanding of my dilemma.

Best regards,
Sean

Sean

[Eric Chard]

No link.

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“Putting the HARM in ‘harmonica’ since 2005.”
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[Sean Heywood]

Sorry about that… I’m really very new to this forum.

globeofdotslogo.jpg

Sean

[Matthew Keane]

Wow, yeah, so forget my import-and-place-the-dots idea!

But, assuming that the logo designer probably used some kind of plug-in to wrap the image into 3D, they probably have a flat, unwrapped, version somewhere that you could import into CC-Sphere, wrap around a sphere and take for a spin.

Or, if you really wanted to spend some time, and client money, on it, I guess you could recreate it using Form and some funky gradient maps to control the size of the dots.

[Sean Heywood]

Hi Dave, Kevin thanks for you input I really appreciate it cause the only solution I was able to come up with was to painstakingly count every dot and do a flat layout and then take that into AE. I used CC Sphere but the logo doesn’t appear the same but to the naked eye. I’m not sure if one can tell the difference really. My concern though is that the last shot when the globe is in it’s final position it tends to appear somewhat pixelated which is wierd cause the file is a vector. If the video does go through have a look.

Sean

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

This can be re-created with Particle Playground. Perhaps a 1-3-hour job to get it to look like the original. You’re essentially looking at creating a grid made up of dots and then applying a 3D spherical effect onto the grid.

Just remember to create your grid at twice its required length (in pixels) but keeping its height similar as the final output size.

You can do a COW search on one of my Particle Playground tutorials on using Particle Playground to create a grid of objects. Dang! In fact, even CC Repetile may be able to do this.

Good Luck!
RoRK

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[Kevin Camp]

repetile and motion tile could definitely create a grid of circles, but getting the size variation would be tricky… you’d probably need to add card dance…

particle playground would definitely work. i used it a long time ago to create a halftone pattern, which is what that patterns looks a lot like. but particular could create it much faster using a ‘layer gird’ emitter and setting the layer rgb usage to ‘lightness-size’.

of course you still need to create the layer map that will cause the variation in size.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW