Blender Tutorial: Create a Professional Logo Animation

today guys this is Andrew pricee from blender Google calm and in this video tutorial I'm going to be showing you how to create a professional logo animation for a movie company so this that you can see right here is for a fake company that I created called emerald pitches and it is the exact result that I'm going to be showing you in this tutorial so I'm hoping that from the techniques and things that I show you in the tutorial you can then use that to apply to your own personalized animation for your own company or logo or whatever it is that you're trying to promote so if you've ever tried to make a logo animation before you'll know that it sounds easy on paper and then you open up blender and then you realize that there are a million in one different ways that you could present that animation and it all becomes a little bit daunting and and then you start doing things that are a little bit silly moving the camera around too much and and it gets a little bit funny after a while so I think the first thing first before we get started I think we actually should cover some theory regarding logo animation so I say theory you know it's a PowerPoint presentation that's about as close as it gets um so I put together some tips I went out and looked a whole bunch of animations I wrote down some tips on the best ones and I'm going to display them right now so first things first go ahead and do just that go to youtube and watch as many logo animations as you can just by doing that you will learn a lot you will learn what works and what doesn't work and write notes as well like really get out a pen piece of paper and write out some notes so if you find a good one just write out some things that you think look good why they work you think and and then move on to the next one and then by the end of it you'll have a whole list of notes which you can then use that for your own animation now first things first you need to be thinking about what your company stands for that's really really important because that is the basis the foundation for the whole logo animation if you don't give any thought to this it's not going to match and it's obvious it can actually hinder your brand right then promoted so you wanna make sure that you get it right so think about what it stands for and how you can portray that so is the company like professional are they creative is it like an extreme sports company all those things they're really going to be building the actual animation itself so give that some thought now as a tip it's a good idea to start the animation slowly and then build up to it so reveal just a little bit at the start so make it look kind of like a blurry picture or something like that or like zoomed far away or something and then slowly pull out to reveal the full logo if you look at pretty much any movie production logo animation they all pretty much do that they start out with something blur a little bit something you're not quite sure what's going on in the background there and then suddenly the logo appears and it all makes sense that's just a way it's just a way to kind of draw the viewer in if you make it kind of like a puzzle the Buhl then want to kind of figure out what's going on and then it'll obviously build up to the logo animation rather than just blam here's the logo people go oh yeah that looks pretty amateur so yeah tip alright keep it under 10 seconds the shorter the better I'm sure I'm not the only one that has seen a few animations on YouTube or a few intros that are a little bit too long I've seen some that'll like longer than 30 seconds don't do that it annoys the viewer especially if the video is only 30 seconds long itself and you got a 30-second long logo intro yeah that's not good that's not good um I mean like a minute long and you've got half the video as an animation don't do that try to keep it under 10 seconds that might sound really short but to the viewer that will seem longer than it is people get annoyed when they see animation so do try to keep it as short as possible and this is just an observation I made most intros end with the logo on a black background and that's not a rule you can break that obviously but if you want to keep it consistent with I guess you know how the movie production companies do it that's something to think about and last but not least spend some time on the sound design you don't want to do some awesome visuals and then go out there and get some cheap free sound effects online throw them all together and it just ruins everything you want to put some thought and some effort into the sound design so that they actually mesh together and and that's what will really help to sell the professional level result so that is something to think about as well now this is not mine but it is a brilliant example of a logo animation and so I thought I would include it here just to show you basically how a good logo animation should look it was created by Colin Levy who some of you may know was the director of Syntel he's now actually working at Pixar but he created his own movie production house or name called Lightning Hill productions or pitches and and he created this all by himself using blender and he gave me permission to put it in this tutorial so I thought I would show it here so you can see that you know it uses everything we just talked about in that little that little tip list it starts out slow pulls out it sort of makes you curious what's going on and pull through a house and then BAM at the end there there's the logo on the black background it's very impactful it's very slick very professional and it reflects the name it's you know it's got to do with movies storytelling stuff like that and I think it's perfect for its use and done it's a brilliant example so I'm really glad that Khan gave me permission to include it but yeah that's it so let's get into the tutorial before we start I'll just show you what the finished scene is actually made up of so this is it right here this is what it looks like in blender so I'm just going to play the animation right now so this is the end of it and all right here's the start so you've got this emerald which is blocking the view of the camera and the emerald pulls out oh there goes the emerald pictures that did it done and that little plane that flies across there that little that guy is that's casting a reflection on the surface of them in the middle there which is what gets that nice Sheen effect across it at the end this that's a cool little thing I decided to throw in there but in this tutorial I'm going to be showing you how to do everything so we're going to be making the text first giving it a brushed metal material making the gemstone putting in the light stuff like that to get there elections then doing this particle so we get this nice you know floating particles you can see there the effect that it's got and that looks really cool and you've got a camera that's out of focus it gives you that nice depth of field in the background there so I'll show you how to be how to do that we'll do a little bit of compositing I guess at the end there I'm just adding in the glare the nice shiny effects and things like that as well as of course the animation so a whole bunch of stuff in this tutorial so without further ado I think it's time we go and get started so first things first let's go ahead and add in that text so you can go ahead and add in anything you want for your example of course using the fake company name Emerald pitches now first thing you need to do is of course change that font do not ever use the default blender font if I find anybody that uses this for anything you're going to be in big big trouble always change it it comes free with blender that font so I guess it's like an open-source font but I don't think it was actually designed to be used for anything useful just just there so you can actually see you know what it is you're typing but you should always change the font to something else so I'm using the font optimist princeps which is one that I got off dafont.com so if you go there and it's a great great site for finding font by the way how to recommend it but anyway this is one I'm using that I thought worked quite well for the name and world pitches so currently it's 2d it's completely flat so we want to add some depth to that so over here in the in this panel here I'm going to change the extrude amount to be point zero five and there you see you've got the text that's got a little bit of thickness but the trouble is is that the corner of that text is really really sharp and you want it to be catching more of the light so that you get more reflections and things like that so I'm going to go ahead and bump up this bevel amount to be point zero zero nine and you can see now you've got some bevel there and I'm also going to turn up the resolution for that I'm going to turn that up to four so you get even more reflections and more little glimpse of light as the as the camera goes around and stuff like that as a problem though once you add in that bevel you can see that you get this weird effect now this happens from time to time when you add in depth and bevel and stuff like that where the font gets distorted and then you get this little you know errors happening basically so we needed to convert this anyway so as well go ahead and do that so I'm going to go ahead and hit Alt C and then hit mesh from curve and what that's done is it's now actually made it an editable mesh so I'm going to go ahead and fix this little problem right here now you might not have this depending on what font you used but if you do this is what I would recommend doing um let me just fix it properly I guess there we go move this up there all right now I'm I guess I'm not really doing a proper job this is kind of a hack I guess you know if this was going to be up really close with the camera in my well you would want to spend a lot more time on this but given that the camera is not going to be seeing most of this I can get away with just patching it so that actually that's not too bad okay that's uh yeah pretty good anyway that's a quick way to fix that now the reason that we converted this to a mesh other than you know also fixing that little problem but we want to be applying a brushed metal shader to us we want this nice you know brushed metal so it looks like it's been brushed you know what I'm talking about I hope so but we need to have UV coordinates for that so it needs to be an actual mesh so anyway now to mesh we can UV unwrap it so I'm going to split the viewport I'm going to change this to be UV image editor going into edit mode selecting all vertices I'm going to hit you and then project from view and I just want to position it so that it's like square in the grid like that that's pretty much joining to do BAM it's now you've you unwrapped so I guess I shouldn't have closed that so quickly I need that again I'm going to change this now to be the node editor and I'm going to be going and adding in a new material so this is the node editor right here actually you know what I've started doing it this way now so splitting it that way because the know editor works a lot better horizontally than it does vertically so I'm starting to split it horizontally you know you know what I mean like this as opposed to like that anyway all right so first thing we need to do is add in a glossy shader like that and this roughness value there that's going to be the amount of the softness amount of the reflection so I'm going to set that to be point zero five the closer you make that to zero the more it's going to be a mirror so making that point zero five that'll look cool now in order to get the brushed metal effect what we need to do is add in a texture and in this instance we're going to be using the noise texture which for the oldies of blender used to be called the cloud texture but it's now been changed to noise and we're going to go ahead and well let's just let's see how this looks alright so I'm going to go first of all to to make it apply to bump you could just go ahead and connect that straight to the displacement but that's going to give you 100 percent maximum bump and it's going to look absolutely horrible so the way to to change the amount of bump as I'm sure a lot of you know is to add in a math note change this to be multiplied and then this value the one in the bottom right there that's going to be the amount of bump that you give it so let's just set that to be alright let's go to point one all right let's see how that looks now we won't actually be able to see anything if we would have rented this right now because there's no lights or well there is a light but I'm going to delete it because we don't actually want that one so in order to get this to work let's just position the cursor there I'm going to add in a plane I'm going to rotate this by 90 degrees so it's the same as the plane itself I'm going to stretch that out pull that down up like this now so I'm just making this long bar then and this is just to cast some reflection onto the surface of the text now for this I need to go ahead and give this a material as well just so that we can you know see things as we're working so I'm going to give this an emitter value of five not 58 five okay so now let's just save this and I'm going to set this to rent it and there we go you can now see the text as it's looking now you see it's got this horrible looking smudgy looking stuff now that's actually our noise texture right here so you can see that if we increase this scale amount that that value decreases or it gets smaller I should say the trouble is is that we've got so much bump going on that it's hard to excuse me it's hard to see what's happening so if I just set this be point zero zero five and you can see if we zoom in there it's here it's a lot clearer now we actually want this scale to be to be a lot smaller so let's try it mm let's just see how that looks mm yeah you know it's not too bad but anyway this is a well first of all because we've you've you unwrapped it we should be using the UV coordinate so let's do that right now add a texture coordinate node and then plug that into UV okay so you can see that's changed already because now using the UV coordinates you see you've got the bump map there which is cool but now in order to get that brushed metal we want it to actually stretch the texture now you normally don't want stretch textures but in this instance you do you want to stretch across that surface of the of the of the text so in order to do that I'm going to go and add in a mapping node drop this bad boy in right there and then this X scale I'm going to make that something really small like point zero two and there we go now we've got some stretch texture and it now looks like brushed metal yeah but I think it's too stretched because you do want there to be a little bit of the original cloud you know a little bit of variation to it but that's pretty good it's not too bad and then you want it to stretch in the other direction as well you know the across the you know that way the part that's now hidden anyway so I'm just changing that Z value as well but that's fine now this this multiply value there I think that's a little bit too high turns out to be point zero three I think that's pretty good something bad now this plane right here what you're going to be using this in our final one so that's that's pretty cool and we'll just keep that the way it is but I guess now is probably a good time to be positioning the camera so let's go ahead in the camera and then we can know whereabouts we should be putting in our lights and stuff like that all right well we got a camera already but anyway I've just added in another one and going into front view mode and I hit ctrl alt number pad zero no there we go all right um now in this instance I think if that's a good if we turn on in the camera display here you've got safe areas and I'm assuming that is like I don't know what's been decided as you know how close something can be to the edge of the screen so this I think it used to be called title safe so in this instance it's quite helpful so you can see you've got now this like invisible border around where the cameras looking so just make sure the text is inside that area so that's pretty cool so let's let's have a look at it from the rendered view it's pretty good but I actually want this plane to be further back let's move that there and then that's going to make the reflection on it a little bit more diffused across the surface so that you get light at the bottom of the text as well which is important and as well as that we want some light underneath the text so that you get a little bit more oomph I guess like a little bit of power sort of like shining light up underneath the text so let's give this make it a separate material and I'm going to give that three and I'll make the color of this lamp yellow just so that it has you know a little bit something else going on oh that ding sound by the way I'm not sure if you heard it if the microphone picked it up or not the ding sound it's thanks to a great add-on I love it those of you on the on the Facebook page well no I just posted about it but it's called random music it's an add-on which you can get I'll put a link there if you're looking at this video on Blender guru you download the add-on random music makes a ding sound when the render is complete you can configure it you can change the sound I made it make a ding sound but anyway it's great I don't know how I've lived without it basically but anyway getting off topic so got these planes here you can see that they're showing up in the render now we actually don't want them in the road believe it or not they look quite ugly I think so in order to do that and I'll just stop it showing up in the render with the plane selected if you close the set the object I never know the names yeah it's the object panel underneath ray visibility uncheck camera and then do the same for that bottom one there as well let's give that a render now and voila we do not see those planes in the render but everything else is fine I'm going to turn up the samples just for the render you know just so you can actually see it a little bit clearer because 10 isn't really enough to be able to judge what's happening and that's pretty good that's not too bad if you wanted to you could you could give the glossy shader a little bit of a slightly blue color but that's just getting a little bit finicky blue is kind of like the color for like steel like I'm not sure there's like different colors for different metals but that's what I read is like steel so that's what I've been running with anyway moving on so the next thing we're going to be doing is adding in a gem stone okay so you know like a diamond or maybe an emerald now if you go ahead and you google the word diamond you'll see the diamonds are kind of a complex shape and you can't just really get away with like adding a cube and you know making it look like a diamond you can't do that it's it's quite hard and I tried to model a diamond before I realized that it's actually a tool built right into blender which will actually create them for you it is an add-on which somebody has created which is very handy and it is called if you go down here add mesh it's called the extra objects add-on so if you go ahead and enable that if you then go and hit shift a and go mesh you get extra objects gemstones and then you've got gem BAM look at that whew done for you and then if you press T you bring up this toolbar here let me just make this bigger bring up the toolbar and you can actually change it even more you can customize it and that is exactly what we're going to do right now so let it just fool around with this a little but let's just have a bit of fun accountable come over the settings that I used and that's me yeah okay all right let's go radius point eight yeah I've got the settings now I know what I'm doing point three five that's fine and then the pavilion height I'm going to make that point nine segments ten and that is now going to be our Emerald now I guess technically this is like a diamond shape but from what I had a look longer I googled the word emerald and there appeared to be you know many different cuts that you can do for you know gemstones it's not you know this isn't just a diamond shape I think it is traditionally but anyway don't even get me started on diamonds just had to you know I recently proposed to to my girlfriend now for Yonsei and I had to buy her a ring as you do man like diamonds fool I will never understand that concept but anyway it's getting it's getting off topic again yes so I've just as I've been talking dropped in this gemstone right here and and I'm moving this text apart so I actually want to make this pictures here this second one I'm going to make that a separate object so press P and then there we go it's now separate object now the the origin point is still set up over there so you want to make sure that it rotates according to you know the corn right there so I'm just going to select one of these vertices right here hit cursor to selected and ctrl alt shift C one of the hardest keyboard shortcuts to press and then I'm going to hit origin to 3d cursor and then now it will rotate according to where it should be so it's all looking great awesome so now we're going to move the camera again a little bit that's fine all right now looking at this gemstone of course we want to give it a material so let's go ahead add a new material right here and this one is actually quite simple it is a glass shader connect that and then I'm going to set the color to be of course a greenish aqua light color just like so and then if we give this a render announcer look you can see it looks terrible actually it really does look terrible I mean I was planning on saying that anyway but I mean it really really does look terrible um now the reason for that is that diamonds by themselves I guess I guess in the real world they're a lot better at like picking up little light sources and things like that and shining them and stuff you know and they look very pretty and I guess it helps having the setting and all that extra stuff gemstones not diamonds this is an emeralds not a diamond but it in you know in 3d world you need to have that you need to have stuff you need to have light sources that it can reflect now currently you've only got these two light sources so which is why when you render it all you get is something looks really really bland and boring because it's got refraction so it's getting the background which is solid black and thank you ding it's getting that background and there's not a lot going on for it to to refract so what do you say we fixed that II well the easiest way to fix it is to actually add stuff into the world which the gemstone our emerald can actually use so I'm going to go ahead and get fancy with some world nodes oh yeah so going down here in the node editor I'm going to click on that little world icon and I'm going to click use nodes and I'm going to be using something which I don't think I've ever done I might be one of the first this is maybe this is a blender first you know why because this is crazy nobody would in their right mind add a checker node to the background because that would look terrible wouldn't it yeah let's give it a try so look oh yeah it looks really really bad but there's a purpose to it you can see if we zoom in there on a on our gemstone we've got some interesting looking shapes now some interesting refractions and reflections and it all looks very cool and if I change that color to be black you can see it looks looks even better so you can see where I'm going with this right okay all right let's move this gemstone to a separate layer and let's just focus just on that now I'm going to change the the background first of all and change that strength to be three so it's a little bit brighter and I'm going to change the scaling for for our check it yeah yeah that's right bet you didn't expect to be hypnotized whilst watching a tutorial video there's a first for everything okay so having it in the background like if we render this right now it is actually part of the render that's not like you know ding yep you're hypnotized now now you will do whatever I tell you know the it is actually part of the render so we don't want that do we we actually just want we love what's going on with the gemstone but we don't want it as part of the world so the way around that is to add in a light path node drop this in right here and I'm going to set going to add in a mix node add this in and what do I do that may be right here yes something do you need to be aware of you can see these colors here green goes into green you get into trouble when you do stuff like have one with a yellow input and you put that in there you know if I just take that and I just drop that in there you can see it just completely destroys the render so you want to make sure that the you know it's color-coordinated to help you out so just remember that now so for this what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the output from the Eze camera ray and I'm going to put that into the mix input and what that's going to do now is it's going to keep the it's going to keep everything the way it was inside the diamond but now the background is going to be whatever I put into this bottom input so if I make this a solid black as you can see I have done now we've got all that stuff that's still happening inside the diamond I keep saying diamond inside the Emerald but everything else is black the background which is what is important you can see we've also got some reflections and if we add in our add in our text again you can see that it's now colored with it's colored our text which we don't want so and it's also made you know it's a little bit shiny on the outside of the Emerald and stuff so it's picking up gloss as well so we don't want the gloss either so the way around that is if I add in another mix node let's just duplicate this one duplicate that and then let's take the output of the is action ray drop that in right there and now it's not actually powering the gloss either it's now just powering the I guess just the refraction that's pretty much all that's left so now you've got some interesting stuff happening inside there and the rest of the scene is untouched which is the way it should be basically so it's looking pretty cool so far so let's go ahead give this a render see how everything looks it should be looking pretty fine and if it is all looking good then we can go ahead and move on ding and more pitches BAM looking pretty good next step is to add in the background so black is great but we want it to look interesting so for the background if you don't remember what we what I showed at the start of the animation it's got like a fuzzy kind of like a floating depth-of-field type background and so how we're going to do that in blender is we're going to be using a particle system to create some particles and then they're going to be floating around in the background and then the camera is going to be out of focus at least for the background and it should hopefully look very cool if we've done it correctly so the way to do this we need somewhere for the particles to be generated from so I need to add in a plane and looking at it from the camera viewport so let's sighs I guess that's pretty good and you want to make sure that it is positioned so that it is off camera just like so just so that you get part because this is going to be an animation so this is where on frame 1 right now and so I'm going to go ahead hit I and then select keyframe location and then now I'm going to jump to let's say frame 10 let's just make this this little tiny window down here I'm going to make this the time line yeah there you go actually that was a good idea I don't have much control over it but anyway you can see right there it's on frame 10 right now um so I'm going to position the this board this plane above the camera right now and I'm going to hit I and then select location again so now if we play that we should see the plane moves over 10 frames but you can see it starts and it slows like when it starts off it starts off slow and then towards the end it slows down as well and that's because if you go to the F curve modifier the graph editor I should say change other I don't know I don't know what it's called anymore it is called the F curve all right we don't want the Y and the X by the way so we can delete them but this Zed here you can see that it's smoothed off so I'm going to select those and then hit vector now when we play that it's a straight animation from start to finish which will mean we get an even distribution of particles when they are generated okay so now that plane is in place we can add in a particle system and if we play that it looks terrible doesn't it looks absolutely terrible so we need to change some settings I'm going to change first of all important one is the start and the end time for our particles let's make that one and ten so now all those particles are generated in the first ten frames and that is all we want the lifetime of the particles to be 250 so that it is alive for the entire duration of the animation I'm going to make the amount of those particles 5,000 let's save this before it crashes there you go now you go to a whole bunch of particles but they're falling you can see so let's go ahead and turn off the gravity because we don't want gravity we just wanted to be floating around in some I don't know space environment you can see that they're now like moving upwards which is kind of weird and the reason for that is that it's taking part of the animation of the plane itself and the reason it's doing that is because it's got velocity it's got a normal amount so that normal amount will basically throw the particles around depending on how the object is moving so we need to set that to be zero and now that our we have particles we have particles distributed throughout our scene and it all looks lovely okay cool so now comes the fun part we want there to be little floating pieces basically I mean these are just particles at the moment we want them to actually show up in the render and in order for them to show up in the render it needs to actually be duplicating another object I mean you know you've got the render you've got halos but fairly certain cycles doesn't render with halos and I hope it doesn't I hate halos halos are awful they always have problems and it's an old-fashioned method don't ever use it so it needs to be a nice I might get really off topic in this tutorial it needs to be needs to be rendering an object so I'm going to be adding in a circle so just add in a circle and look let's do that again so we've still got the options there we're going options hey there you go okay circle I'm gonna make the vertice count for that eight let's go six so then we go to over six and I make the fill type in gone no let's go eight yeah that's fine okay so it provided it has a face hmm yeah like that otherwise it won't be showing up in the render so make sure it does have a face and then down here in the render options turn off emitter because we don't actually want this plane to show up at all on the render it shouldn't but just to check and then change the due plea to be circle and then now you can see all those particles and now this circle so if I scale that up they're all changing as well so I want to change the size of this to be point zero one and you could also change the randomize size if you want but we're going to leave it as is because let's just say all the dust particles at the same size doesn't really matter and what else are we going to be changing do is the brownian amount this is the key so the brownian amount what that's going to do is essentially just make it so the particles drift around really softly like really really subtly okay so let's just let's just play this just see how it looks mmm wow that is really subtle isn't that barely moving oh okay that's because it's point one okay it should be point one not point zero one point one okay there we go there we go you can see they're moving around slightly just slightly it's kind of hard to see them now because the the circles are rotated flat so the next thing we're going to do is turn on rotation so we're going to change this velocity going to change that to random and I'm going to set that amount to be two I'm going to turn on dynamic so that it's sort of like interacts and stuff I don't know I just did some experimenting I found that it worked the initial rotation I'm going to make that random as well so now if we play this da da look at that look at how seen right now in all its glory so you can see now I mean this would be perfect for like I don't know like DNA or like space the outer space you zoom in on the molecules and then all doing this kind of stuff so this kind of effect I mean once you've set up this particle system and everything you can use this technique for all sorts of logo animations I mean it's quite common and if you have a look at video copilot net org coming net yeah you know Andrew Kramer the the After Effects guy he does a whole bunch of tidal effects and you know logos and stuff like that and he uses this type of effect a lot like having particles that sort of drift around and stuff and well at least a few times anyway it looks cool is that is what I'm trying to say so anyway it's all set up now now for the circle we want it to if we would have rendered this right now we probably wouldn't actually be able to see very much because I'm not all of those particles are lit only the ones that are in range of those of those planes so we want to make sure that the particles are showing up so with our circle they're selected I'm going to give it any MIT value let's make it an emitter of four and then now if we render it you should see all those particles are now displaying in in the render so it looks like it is I said looking pretty cool so let's go down here I'm just going to change the size of these particles because I think they're a little bit too big but should be fine now you can see that looking from our render but it looks kind of like a star field which isn't good because we want you know we want to be the the aim is to really have the text separated from the background and currently it's all sort of mushed in together and the reason for that is that there isn't any sense of depth you know and contrast I guess that's all completely bright like these are all like completely white dots as well as the text so it doesn't actually look that good so we want to fix that and the way to do that is by using depth of field so that the stuff in the background and the foreground is out of this so with our camera here selected go to the camera options and we need something for it to focus on now in this instance I'm going to use this word right there which you can see in the bottom left hand corner or if you hit n you can see the item name is called text so with our camera selected let's go ahead change that focus point to be text and then I'm going to use f-stops because that's just you know what you use a Pio camera you could use radius as well doesn't really matter it's just a measurement so I'm gonna use an f-stop value of point zero two so now if we give this a render yeah it's really noisy okay so that's one thing about depth of field is that it is really really really super super noisy so make sure that you turn up the sample so that you can actually see it properly so let's give that a render now and let's see how that looks I think it is actually still I think maybe it's too too much depth of field because the background is just showing up as like one big blurry mess as opposed to um lots of little dots so let's let's turn that down so basically the high you set that number the last depth of excuse me the less depth of field you get so if I set that to be like zero you would get maximum extreme shallow depth of field in fact they probably just wouldn't really render that well just be terrible um anyway let's just have a look at how this looks once it is rendered ding and there we go it is now rendered so it's looking pretty cool the background is looking nice and out of focus II the text is nice and clear the diamond has gone a little bit out of focus I think it's because the the shallow depth of field is kind of making the you know losing some of that refraction you kind of get around that if you wanted to by upping that and then you'd have to adjust the background I guess but it's overall it's looking pretty good so the next step is to add in the volumetric lighting which is something that a lot of people always I guess in the last tutorial a lot of people are asking me how I did that so and I skipped it in the last tutorial then I had to go back and do like a bonus tutorial it was kind of annoying so I'll just show you I'll just show you right now now currently in cycles let's just to move that out the weigh-in in cycles there is no way to do volumetric lighting yet although it is planned in the next two to three releases so it should be I don't know four to six months probably so you can do it using a combination of cycles and the blender internal render engine so let's do that so currently we've got our scene and it's using the cycles rendering engine so if we want to combine the internal rendering engine a separate rendering engine we have to use a separate scene so I'm going to go ahead and click on this plus button right here and then I'm going to click on link object data and what that's going to do is it's going to take a complete copy of our scene and it's going to it's going to link them all together so that now if I added an animation for the camera it would then reflect it in another scene so you can see that right now there's no difference between the two they look exactly the same that's because there are basically duplicates of each other so for this second one I'm going to go ahead and call this volumetric lighting and the only thing we really need in our scene is these three objects right here and what this is going to do is because we're going to have a volumetric light shining down and we want these objects to block the light if they're in the way and that's the only reason we want those so in this scene the only thing that's actually going to be rendering is the volumetric light so this spotlight which we're going to add but these objects are going to act as you know block like a mask that's the word I'm looking for a mask which is going to mask out the light when when it should be you know wherever so anyway now that we've got our separate scene here we need to go ahead and change it to the blender rendering engine okay so now that we've got that let's go ahead and add in a spot lamp now this is a really quick and easy way to get volumetric lighting in your scene so just look at it from the camera viewport something like that looks pretty good so I'm just moving the spot lamp up just so that it is covering just where the camera is looking right now so it's sort of shining down the side and it's coming out from there you don't want it too close like that otherwise it's going to look really obvious to you know the light sources up there but if you have it sort of off scene it makes it look like the scene is quite big and you've got like a light that's further and then the only thing you need to do is down there underneath hallo you want to turn that on and then turn the steps up to be four for example now if we render this should be really quick you can see you have volumetric light and this these little objects here you can see a casting a faint little shadow just from underneath them so that's kind of cool as well now in order to get some cool lights you've got some like streak effects coming down there we need to add something that blocks the light now this is a method that was taught by I can't remember his name it's the guy that did the underwater tutorial on Blender guru but he he created this method I thought was really cool so I'm going to show you how to do it essentially you just add a plane subdivide it a bunch of times seven times is what I used or maybe eight that's fine hmm yeah we'll go eight so subdivide it whole bunch of times like this and then you position it just above where the spotlight is like that and then you use the let's say there's circle brush tool here and I think I subdivided that too many times yeah let's just let's go back one there we go it's just too many it's just gone ting you grab this circle brush tool and then you just start taking out parts like this now the point of this is to make it so that you get parts that have you know sort of like a 50/50 I guess so I'm clicking and then middle mouse clicking to take away and so I'm just selecting some vertices and then deleting others so just something like that it doesn't have to be exact and I've just deleted those vertices and then now if I position that so that it is over where the spot lamp is looking also if you turn on show cone hey they didn't do anything why isn't it you oh okay you have to be in solid View mode so click show cone you can see how it is you know where the light is actually going to be cast so something like that and then now if we have a look that our Dean you can see we have a lot nicer looking volumetric light now how do we combine the two well let me tell you you go to the this is in our scene by the way this is cycles now so we can work this is where we're going to be doing everything the only thing we did was into that volumetric lighting anyway so oh oh okay all right let's go back let's go back to where we were screw the default okay let's change that okay we don't want these objects to actually render we only want them to mask okay so we need to go to the render layer panel here and we want to move this spot lamp and that lamp and that plane we want to move that to a separate layer so let's move that to layer 3 and then in our render layer here we want to make sure that we only select layer 3 there and we want to make sure that it masks everything else so click on all Z so now let's give that another render and it should look almost the same I guess as what it was before but now that text isn't actually rendering at all it's just masking okay all right glad I've done that I feel a lot better now okay whew all right so to add the two we need to go ahead and add in a random a new render layer here and you can see you've only got one render layer which is what do we do well you change the scene buddy change it to volumetric lighting and then now if we add in a viewer node connect the two and then let's add in a mix node set this to be add it's that simple folks and then you just turn down this add amount to be something that you like I guess it's too much it's good point sort of you want it to be subtle because remember you want to have the background dark enough that the text is separated from it but the light does add a nice element to the scene so you want the light to be visible but not too visible you want to have a nice balance so all about the balance all right so next we want to add a vignette of course someone told me I should have watched that video there's a new method for creating a vignette or something using masks or something oh I didn't watch that video but anyway let's just go ahead and do the method I always use it works fine if it's not broke don't fix it this is what they say although if you can't figure out when you actually clicking on what am i doing distort distort displace lens's tours can you realize I mean can you believe that I forget how do you make a vignette after I make them so many times it's ok so I'm changing the just adding in a math node set that to greater than lens distortion you can see what I'm doing I'm I'm trying to speed past this part because I kind of embarrassed I do it so much and just takes a while set this to relative let's go five percent and then it's good ten bump it up to add a mix node set this to multiply and there we go so what that's done is it's now darkened the edges of the render so the focus is now more on what's happening in the middle so that's the whole point of that and we can go ahead make it look even nicer let's do some color grading so we're going to add in a color balance node get this wheel in there and I'm going to set the middle tones to purple color purpley pink I guess yeah like that and then let's make the highlights green slightly green not too much just a little bit now the reason I'm using those two cones is because they are complementary colors on the color wheel they're opposites so Green is the only color that we've got to go off so green the opposite of green is a purple color so purple goes nice with green so that's why I'm very subtly coloring it just like that okay so now we want to do the compositing for the rest of it which is our text so we wanna make sure the text has a nice kind of glow effect to it and more importantly our emerald here has a nice shiny dazzling glare effect to it so the way we're going to do that is you want to we have to separate these objects from the rest of our scene because you can't apply an effect to just this without it applying you know the rest of you know everything that's currently happening unless we were to do if we go over here to our object panel and then down here underneath relations you've got something called pass index and chances are you've probably passed over this yeah yeah I know pretty clever but it's actually really helpful you just go ahead click on pass index change that to any number I'm just changing it to 1 and then so for both of these the emerald and the pictures I've made them pass 1 mm-hm plus 1 and then for our diamond emerald to keep calling it a diamond I'm going to make it pass index 2 and then as well as that you need to go to the render layers down here and then turn on object index then once you've done that you need to go ahead and give it another render so give it another render now Bing all right looks exactly the same but if we go to the compositor what we can do now is where is it is it vector no is it converter oh yeah it is go to converter ID mask and then take the output of the index object which is that one that we enabled in the layers down there and then if we set that to be 1 now if we just add in a mix node right here take the output put it into the factory input right there let's flip that around make the output for that black that on we now have the text completely separated from the rest of the scene so we can now add effects just to that text so the first thing I want to do or really the only thing I want to do to that text at this time is just to add a blur like a glow effect to it so I'm adding in a blur node and I'm going to set that yeah set to fast Gaussian let's go X aspect correction let's go to percent it's pretty good but what I actually want I want that I want that glow effect to actually only really apply to the top portion of the text not really what's going on underneath so I'm going to add in an RGB curve node like here and then I'm just going to add a nice sloping curve like that that's just going to get rid of the low contrast areas like so and then if I just move all of this stuff over just move this around if I add in an ADD node I'm sorry a mixed node set it to add and take the output from that there you go now if I just turn down this factor input up make sure it's the right way around make sure it's always in the bottom input you can see that I now have control over how much glow is powering those bearing that text there so I just want a subtle glow so something like that should look pretty good now I want to do the exact same thing for our emerald so I'm just going to duplicate that that ID mask I'm going to add this I should have you know duplicated the mix node as well but anyway it's fine I'll just mix this around so now if I just change this index amount to be two you can see that I now have full control over the over the emerald I used to do it so that I would separate things onto separate separate layers but when you do that it actually has to render the scene twice like once for all the objects and then once for whatever objects are on there and it really does slow down the render times but if you use it this way you just render it once and then it just takes elements from that using an ID mask so it's a lot better anyway so for this for this particular emerald I'm just going to be adding in no I didn't want that what are you doing man you're crazy so just just grabbed it right out of my hand I want to add this glare effect to this not what this thing is going on so let's just focus on this I'm going to turn down the threshold okay and let's turn the mix up so it's just the glare effect all right and you can see the more I set that threshold to then the the less portions of that emerald is actually applying that glad to so if you turn it up you know too low then you just get like this fat blurry glare so you just want to get some sharp reflections like that I'm just going to try it with that and see how that looks I'm going to turn up the streaks effect to be nine turn up the iterations to be five turn up the color modulation as well it's goes 7 it looks a lot better if the if the actual color itself is white in fact if I wanted to I could add in an RGB to black and white and that would be you'd think it would work yeah it doesn't anyway yeah maybe just a maybe a saturation node here or something if I just turned down the saturation there you go you got you got some nicer looking color modulation so the color modulation will really color that you know that streak effect which is basically what happens when diamonds you know have that glint Iike Larry type of look to them so that that can really easily very fake that so that's that's kind of cool effect so I'll just add in this add node in right here just drop that in so this is going to be applying that effect let me just see okay so I've got that applying it over the top of this I can't see oh yeah it's just really really faint so I had to kind of see what's going on just bring back some of the saturation of that emerald I don't know if that's helping at all you know but anyway let's maybe crank that up a little bit more it's good too it's not it's not really working for me but I think it's too green and I think again into that that depth of field is kind of a bit too much for the scene so it's kind of overpowering because the picture arm or one other thing I forgot to show you if you want to get more refractions in in the gemstone you can add a bevel effect and then if I just turn this down say like 2 or 3 or something you get more refractions and it will just look overall a lot nicer so that's just something to do well we will we render it in a little bit as well but let's just take a look at that I mean that's pretty good that's pretty much how it is I think again that volumetric effect is too overpowering let's just turn that down to two maybe three point zero three perhaps again you want to make sure you get the balance just right and I'll give that our render again just with that bevel effect on the diamond and you'll see if that makes any difference yeah not really it's pretty much the same but you know if you had proper depth of field I guess a little bit better but anyway that's it that is the that's the still that's done now this is of course a tutorial about animation so we've got to have some animation in it so this is the last frame of the animation basically so this being the final scene obviously so we essentially just need to work in Reverse so we've already got the last frame done now we want to make it so that this text starts off camera like behind the camera and then it flies out and goes to where it is right now so with everything word is right now I'm going to go ahead and hit insert lo insert a keyframe lock rod which is location and rotation so it's going to do that for the diamond and the text basically not the diamond the emerald man I keep getting them wrong anyway so that is on frame 250 I'm just going to change this to be timeline so we can now start doing stuff with it okay all right so we've got particles that ago that I generated up - first of all we should catch those particles so that because you can see there's stuff going on like I want to frame 10 right now 20 and it's not it's not there so it needs to be baked there we go so up to frame 10 10 so let's just make the starting frame of the animation 10 and we want this to be off-camera so this side this pitch is 1 this is the one that flies so that it goes like through the see like when when it flies past it kind of you know go through there so you have to sort of think about the timing of the animation so think about what we said at the start you want to make sure that it starts off really subtle and you know doesn't reveal very much it's very vague and then it slowly you know brings in everything else together and then you get the final logo as it you know as it's presented at the end so it needs to start off you know as I said on a vague note so I want to make it so that it's actually looking through the emerald into the refracted light of this word emerald so the diamond really I guess what we can position this one that's what I was trying to do originally so let me just know okay we'll do the diamond first okay so I'm just trying to think about although the piecing itself so you have to try and think about is over how long you want that diamond to be the gemstone the emerald how long you want that to be in front of the camera like that kind of like vague stage so I'd say about four seconds is pretty good so thinking at 25 frames per second four seconds is 100 frames so that's where you want to put the keyframe so let's just move this emerald right in there see I got it right that time actually said emerald just good I'm going to move this here it's going to be rotated am I going to rotate it yeah I think if I look about it through that top part honor maybe about there I think that should be pretty good alright and then if I just set a keyframe for location rotation it should be good and then let's do the same with our word emerald let's move this in and I'm just going to rotate it just so that it has a little bit of movement when it flies out as well okay that's pretty good I'll move it in just a little bit tighter like so and then I'll set that location rotation and I also want the camera to actually be zoomed in so that it's kind of like looking through that gemstone so it's actually I need to animate this focal length so I want to be fully zoomed out at say let's say about 180 so I'm going to set the keyframe for 35 because that's what it's going to be but at the start up until about let's say let's say a hundred now let's go 90 mm-hmm 90 yeah I want it to be zoomed in so let's just grab this zoom this right in I'd say yes 60 is pretty good let's place a keyframe at 50 over so at 60 so now if we play that you can see what's happening so it's not that hard to really get a you know legal animation pretty easy when you think about it now this initial part you want obvious you don't want a static image to be right there you want this emerald to be moving slightly so at the starting frame of this animation I need this to be if I just look at it let's say right there so I'm looking at the emerald directly overhead if I rotate this okay where was it alright let's just try that again you know I'll rotate it slightly a little bit like that I'll place another keyframe there and then I'll rotate it slightly this way as well location rotation okay cool so now if I play that you can see that the emerald is slowly moving like that which should get some cool-looking refractions okay so let's just try let's just give it a whirl see how it looks now the problem is is that actually this you know where everything is right now having depth of field would be crazy the depth of field would just make everything blurry it would take forever to render so actually what I did is I actually used the D focus node in the compositor so if I just go here and then use deep focus I just drop that in let's say I move it right to the front it's going to be whenever it is referent there let's just add a little route this is something that's cool too new feature for compositing you've got the reroute feature so you can then use that let's just drop that in there move then just replacing everything where it is referenced cool thing about the reroute feature is I can just have that point right there and then if I want to drop something in between I don't have to go through and connect all those one-by-one I just have to connect that one right there which is kind of cool so now I can add some D focus here now I guess technically this is like a I don't know an outdated outdated feet to the de focus node you should be using the cycle focus then but it makes really really smooth looking depth of field so it does work really well in this instance so I'm going to roll with it let's go max blur 32 let's set those settings as they are and then let's give this a render okay you can see the render is actually showing up black and I realize what I've done I set I tried to turn off the depth of field for the camera by setting the f-stop to zero but actually zero is maximum depth of field as I said before so you change it to radius and then set the radius size to zero and then it will actually turn off depth of field so just keep that in mind so if we give this a render right now what you should see is actually you can see the Diamonds actually got the diamond the emeralds got a lot of light to it and that's because it's using the world settings but actually when it's up close we don't actually want all those refractions going on we only want that later on so the way we're going to do that is by actually doing a little bit of I guess kind of cheating it's not physically accurate but it's so it's what you do follow the animations I guess you gotta you've got to just work and till it works I guess so I'm going to set the the background strength for this at the very start let's say up until about frame 90 now frame let's go once it's about there so about a frame 140 I'm going to set this now let's go 160 set a keyframe for that strength and then 140 and we set another keyframe for zero so now if we give this a render we shouldn't actually see all those refractions coming through okay so it's looking a lot better now cool all right let's see how this looks when it's rendered okay so you can see I stop the render already you can see there's a problem we've got the the planes which are casting reflections and stuff on our text and it's showing up in the refraction here so there's one thing we can do to stop that and that is down here underneath the object like with our panel it's right with our plane here selected if we just turn off transmission for both of those and that will stop that and also I realize we need to make sure that there is light that is actually going to our text here so that we can actually see so one thing I did with my final animation was actually animated it so that this plane you can see right here actually followed this path of this of this text so if I just have a look at you know where that animation stops so it stops about here from 250 or whatever if I just make a make a keyframe there for location and then from when it starts moving which is about a frame I guess 110 let's just move this back position this about there let's say and then let's set another location there so now that plane will actually follow that down there so that means that in the in this refracted glass from the Emerald you should actually now be able to see the text on the other side oh one other thing the pitches that actually needs to be animated as well so so we'll just keep that where that is and I'm going to move it let's say so once everything starts moving is about let's go 120 I'm going to position this behind the camera right there let's go location and rotation both of them together and then let's rotate that as well so it's got a little bit of a twist to it I guess something like that set location rotation and then now if I have a look at the through the through where the camera is looking there we go that's pretty perfect actually I'm surprised that actually came out right first time I think last time was a lot harder but anyway um cool alright so let's give this another render now and let's see how that looks all right well you can see that it's it's missing the text in the refracted emerald there so I think this is actually too close and it's perhaps it's kind of missing it or perhaps it is a little bit off so if I position it there perhaps and maybe a little bit more forward and then set that there instead okay let's just take a look at that now I just give that another render it takes a while before you've got it right I think I trialed maybe about 30 different positions for the emerald and different you know movements and things like that before I got it so that you know the text was rendering enough and you know it was at the right angle so it really is just a matter of trial and error and you can see again it's not really getting the the text like we want it so I'm going to have to make sure you got on the right keyframe let's move that out a little bit I'm not sure why it's a sure why it's not really showing up I guess it really does depend on how the the emerald is positioned as to whether or not you're actually going to get the actual text showing through so it's all very important if you don't get it right you're going to miss it a course I think I think we can actually see some of the text showing through oh yes there's part of the a right there yes okay cool so I think we can do if that's where that plane starts moving I'm going to position this forward let's move that there location rotation let's give that another quick render I don't think there's actually light which is hitting the hitting that text like it should I think actually should probably be higher perhaps let's just say that see if we're getting any now no I'm still missing it it's just one of those things there we go all right we finally got some light on our text where it is you can see it's a little bit fiddly this whole process this animation yeah it's a whole bunch of tricks a bunch of hacks to try to get it so that so that it works just enough so that the animation plays out and the audience is fooled and that's all it needs to be done it's only ten seconds long and that's that's really all there is to it it's just a big to big magic trick basically anyway let's say let's take a look once it's finished rendering but a ping and there it is with the diff defocus effect showing through as well I think that's pretty much it I think we can now draw the tutorial clothes we've got the animation pretty much exactly as it pans out in the final one everything else is carefully planned as it was now I'm going to include the final project file that I used for my final scene which is this one right here so the rear eye there are a few things that I did differently I guess mainly one of the biggest ones was that and actually in order to get it rendered and you know in time for this tutorial actually had to cheat so I used the other said before I use the defocus node which we just used then and then I also used as well as that I used the normal one which is from the camera right here so that as the the text pulled out there it then switched over to the defocus on the camera instead of the fake to focus in the compositor really complicated basically all I did was I rendered two sets of frames so the like I rendered half the animation on that and then I flipped it I changed some stuff and I rendered the start of it using the defocus node and that's because when the text was in the distance using just the defocus node it was getting some weird artifacts around the edge of the text so I had to do some fancy stuff like that anyway there's always a little bit of stuff which I can't really show you in the tutorials because you know it's either not appropriate and I just had to do it in order to get it to work for the tutorial or it's just going to take too long and it's just not really part of it but anyway so I'm going to include the the final one this is pretty much it exactly how it is so you guys can download that you can pull it apart and have a bit of fun with it and I'm really interested to see what you guys create with this tutorial you can see I added in a little that little shining gleam effect you can check that out there as well I'm interested to see what you create with this so if you make a cool logo introduction for your company or brand or whatever it is and you yet using this tutorial if you if you create something cool do send it to me or leave a comment below or something like that let me know because I'm really interested in seeing what you guys create it's always fun to check out other people's stuff that they make so um that's it for me guys I hope you learned something and I will see you next time

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 629,784

Keywords: logo animation, tutorial, blender

Id: 0cyUupgsQl0

Length: 68min 22sec (4102 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 08 2012