professional logos

[David Bogie]

Practice and feedback and many failures.

Those examples are explicitly and easily reproducible by an experienced designer who is conversant in specialized tools. Such work requires design expertise, a huge amount of aesthetic taste, years of experience, and tons of interaction with people you trust to tell you what’s wrong with your work.

It took me about 5 years to get conversant with After Effects and I still do not understand expressions or scripting even after 15 years. But it’s impossible for me to wrap my head around 3D modelers so I gave that up and hire experts to that stuff.

Practice and feedback and many failures.

bogiesan

[Rdub]

That gives me no answer at all. No where to begin. Of course I practice. I can create the rough in Illustrator and bring them in to AE and use Invigorator. Just don’t seem to get the same kind of look.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

[Peter Greenstone]

You ask for extremely broad information on something that really requires a lot of different developed skills and that can be approached in a lot of different ways. There’s designing the logo and then there’s taking a logo and creating some kind of animation with it such as the NBC tag; usually not the same thing. But I can tell you that if you want to create animated logos like the ones you have described then you need to be working in 3D. You can design it however you want; pencil and paper works for that, but to actually create something like the following…

To do that you need to be working in 3D. Obviously, a lot can be done in 2D and After Effects kind of faked 3D but things like the the example above and other flying logos with extruded text and shapes moving through space with metallic sheen and reflections and complex shadows are done in 3D.

I don’t know of any tutorials that will teach you all of what goes into all of that. What you ask for would cover so many different things from traditional graphic design concepts, to techniques with various tools in 2D and 3D, covering modeling, lighting, rendering, compositing. There is information out there to help you will all of these different areas but you will have to narrow your query down significantly when asking for help or advice, otherwise you’re just asking how to get to Carnegie Hall.

https://www.petergreenstone.com

[Peter Greenstone]

Actually, I’m not very familiar with Invigorator (just saw your mention of it) so I don’t know of its limitations or if it can recreate the types of 3D effects used in those examples of not. Maybe it can and you just need to either find tutorials for that tool specifically, or just practice with it some more.

Explaining a bit more about what part is giving you trouble with creating the look you want would help people come up with more helpful suggestions. Maybe post a video or still of an example you are trying to replicate along with a sample of what you have created.

https://www.petergreenstone.com

[Mark Walczak]

It might be worth looking into Andrew Kramer’s tutorial here:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_titles_in_cinema_4d/

Cinema4D is a great app for handling Illustrator artwork. Furthermore, it integrates with AE almost seamlessly.

Check out https://www.cineversity.com for some free tuts to get you started.

Hope this helps!

What makes you explode?
http://www.explosivegraffix.com

[Rick Dane]

I’m working on doing some of these types of logos… to do this you have to use a 3D software, 3ds max, maya, cinema 4d, etc, etc… these are done in 3D and can only be faked in other applications like photoshop and after effects if you aren’t starting with renders from a 3D app… of course photoshop and after effects often play into the post production of these but to start it off you need to do it in 3D

For modeling of 3D shapes, NURBS is the way to go… look into Rhino or Moi for this, then you need to export to a 3D rendering app and animate it, texture it, etc… if you haven’t used 3D before you will be in for some time learning how to use these applications but it could pay off in the end, https://forums.cgsociety.org/ is a good general forum for computer graphics with a lot of people focusing on 3D there.

[Rdub]

Thank you. Any suggestions as to which might be best? Maybe a shorter learning curve to start with?

[Rick Dane]

As far as shorter learning curve, I don’t know that one program is better than the other since with 3D its about learning the concepts and then you can usually use any of the programs, I have heard that cinema 4D may be easier to learn than the others but I don’t know as I use 3ds max myself..

Something you may be interested in is this plugin: https://maltaannon.com/articles/after-effects/youveelizer/ What this allows you to do is to not have to worry as much about texturing and rendering in 3D and instead apply a texture that you made in a 2d app (like photoshop) directly onto the 3D model within after effects…. look here for info about how to render out the 3D models this way: https://www.adobe.com/devnet/aftereffects/articles/3d_integration_pt1.html

Just something that may get you started faster since there’s a lot that goes into making 3D renders look good and actually I have noticed a lot of TV logos (like just now for the baseball game I am watching) use 3D models that I think use this method since the textures on them look like they were made in 2D (photoshop)

[Rdub]

I’ll begin checking it all out now.

Thank you.

[Rdub]

I’ll be trying the 3ds Max trial. Is there a tutorial relating to this that you would recommend?