Post-Easter Update

Been a while since the last update, but I've been working away.

Spent some time with the production time looking at ways to make some of the effects that we need for the show.

One example is the fingers crossed symbol that needed rotating, but giving some depth so it's not obviously a 2d image. Since there's no simple way to add depth in After Effects, I instead opted to curve the 2d object with the ray-traced 3d settings in the program.

After some time fiddling with the segments and curvature percentages, I made this really rough draft.

The white in the background didn't cover the whole background, which didn't become apparent until the render was finished, as well as the text positioning in the foreground. The production team and myself agreed that the rotations were too fast and the curvature settings weren't quite good enough to give the impression of some depth.

A little more tweaking and some polishing left us with this:

Since Ray-Traced 3D needs nvidia graphics cards, the rendering and processing was done on CPU, meaning this 10 second render would have taken hours. Instead, I rendered one rotation of the hand and looped the resulting .mov file instead, rendering the video you see above in a matter of seconds.

The next step now is to apply this piece, and all the other final images into the apartment scenes, as well as inserting adverts into the outdoor scene I have received. I've also been working on display screens that the characters will interact with, and you'll see those soon too!