New Logo

I have finally created a new logo for myself that I am actually happy with! I have never been particularly happy with any designs I have come up with for myself.

Generally, I have settled for something that I wasn't fully happy with - because I needed a logo of some kind. But I have always been on the lookout for the right inspiration.

My problem, I have always felt, stemmed from my name not lending itself to any pleasing forms. I have experimented with moving my name or it's initials around into various forms. But my name never seemed to hold any artistic quality to it. My initials, KMH, don't combine into any kind of cool shape, or naturally. The K in particular tends to stick out like a sore thumb. I could rearrange their order to MHK, which might create a more pleasing shape, but then it would just be confusing when I might have to explain how it's my name completely rearranged.

I've seen other people utilize their names in other languages, and it tends to look awesome. But I am not from another culture, so trying to write my name in Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Cyrillic, Thai, etc would be completely inappropriate.

My previous logo got the job done, but to me it felt forced, and not very strong. I would say that at best, it could be described as "Meh" at best, and to my eyes, rather ugly. It felt confused.

But finally, I came upon some inspiration. While en route to Budapest, Hungary from Belgrade, Serbia, I met a fellow Digital Nomad (semi-nomad) and we exchanged information and chatted a bit. When I viewed his website, I found his logo caught my eye, and that it was something I could attempt to implement successfully.

To quote Jim Jarmusch: "Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent."

So, I studied his logo, and applied to my own. The key to the logo was negative space. Before, I had focused far too heavily on my initials them self. But here, I was more interested in the seemingly abstract shapes created out of the negative space of my initials. Arranged in quadrants, I placed four black squares over a white background. I then used white letters to cover the black squares and produce my desired effect over three of the squares. I placed my name within the fourth square.

I then moved and adjusted the specific locations of the letters and black squares to create an even balance to the piece overall.

I really like this design, because it plays to simplicity. It's a single color, high contrast and feels abstract, while also conveying the information I want it to. 

Project Notes: Wine Pour

Project Notes: Wine Pour

Description:

After seeing a few demonstrations of the BiFrost particle system built into Maya, I decided I wanted to figure a few things out with it. It seems to be a pretty powerful and intuitive system that I could utilize in future projects.

I want to use this project to learn the basics of BiFrost and create a simple scene. I only plan on making this a still image, and I can work on animation later. My idea is to create a dynamic image of wine pouring into a glass.

Modeling / Scene Setup:

I really wanted to keep the scene simple, so I created a backdrop wall, a wine bottle, a wine glass, and a table with table cloth.

Both the wine bottle and glass were modeled to be accurate in a working sense, and thus retain the thickness they would in real life. To each of these, I created glass shaders utilizing mia_material_x shaders. To the the wine bottle, I added a green tint to the glass.

The table cloth I applied a red shader to. Although it does not appear in the image itself, it did provide reflective light and affect the ambient occlusion. It can be subtly seen in the reflection of the glass as well.

The wall is a simple plane. To it, I applied a diffuse tan shader. I chose the tan / beige color as it contrasts well, and compliments the red wine I intended to create. I also applied a bump map utilizing fractal noise to create spackled look that dry-wall typically has.

For the lighting, I went with a 3 point lighting set-up: key, fill, and rim. All three were spotlights with a warm yellow light. I set the cone angle to 90 and penumbra angle to -19 to create a soft falloff. 

The wine bottle cast a very weird shadow that detracted from the image, so I turned off shadows from my key light. This ultimately made the shot look better, and I didn’t lose anything by dropping it. 

Originally, I had the decay rate for the light set to quadratic, but this required me to up my light intensity drastically, and that resulted in a blown out liquid. So I returned to a setting of no decay, and the result appeared to be fine.

BiFrost:

To create the BiFrost liquid, I decided to go very simple, and not get to involved here. After all, I was going for simplicity with this particular project. I created a small cylinder and put it inside of my wine bottle towards the back. I made the cylinder be the BiFrost liquid emitter. I then set the bottle and the glass to be colliders for the liquid.

The voxel size was too large initially however, as the particles wound up getting stuck inside of the bottle. I then set the voxel size to .05 and this allowed for the particles to smoothly flow out. By placing the emitter at the back of the bottle, it also allowed for the particles to recover from the initial emitting process and act more like a flowing liquid than a splashing liquid.

To change the color of the liquid, I went into the hypershade editor and changed both the diffuse and reflected color to a deep red. 

Conclusion:

I think the final result looks pretty good. I believe I accomplished what I set out to with this particular project, and I have some directive on where I’d like to go with it, as well as where I need to look to improve. 

I think that while the liquid looks good, there is something off that it makes it look more like red water, than it does like wine. I believe this has something to do with the refractive qualities between water and alcohol - I intend to look into this. 

The render times were much to high, and I had to sacrifice certain rendering qualities to keep render times to a somewhat reasonable level. But at 20 minutes to render a frame, without shadows, and low settings in ambient occlusion and final gather, I will need to work on the efficiency if I intend to create an animation or anything more complex than this piece.

Project Notes: Trapcode Form

Project Notes: Trapcode Form

description:

This was yet another impromptu "project." I saw a project with a galaxy utilizing Trapcode Form, and I decided to explore the plug-in. I ended up creating four different projects using it, and each provided me a little insight to the tool. 

Black Hole:

This particular design was modeled after the Red Giant logo. Red Giant created the plug-in so I just went with it for basic practice.

I established the Base to Form a Box - Grid, to the size of my composition at 1920 x 1080. I set my particles to 300 x 300 x 1st 

I utilized a Fractal field, XYZ which was linked with a displacement of 150 to create waviness to the design. I then added a flow of 50 evolution to create a billowing effect type. I set the complexity to 4, and the F scale to fifth

To create the bubble in the center, I applied a Spherical Field with a strength of 100, a radius of 480 and a feather of the 55th

To add a little bit more dynamics to the animation, I added a twist of 2 to the overall effect, and then I rotated the x-axis on a loop.

I then applied a color map in the quick maps section to give it the color gradient it has.

The text was made utilizing a repeater node, to create a spacey kind of title.

Synapse:

This design essentially follows the exact same layout as the Black Hold above. The only differences are really the specific number parameters, the direction of the rotation, and the color map.

This began to take on a look to me of a synapse one might see in a medical animation, so I decided to try and push that idea further here.

elephant:

This was a simple idea I took as an idea of ​​creating a hologram style projections on a flat surface. I took a picture taken at Borobudur, in Indonesia and used it as the displacement map for the particles. I applied a fractal field to it to create the wavy look. I like the idea, but I do not think the image I chose was the best image for this idea.

Earth:

The particle earth took it's inspiration from the numerous holograms and such similar designs one usually sees in sci-fi movies such as Star Wars. For this, I decided to go in a cinematic direction rather than just display the particles as a title or such.

I began by creating a black solid to which I applied Form. The Base Form I changed to a layered sphere, and set the size to 600 x 600 x 600, 200 while keeping particles in the x and y, and only 1 sphere layer.

In the Layer Maps node, I applied an image of Earth in Black and White, utilizing the alpha and the size layer to project particles only on the landmasses. I then applied a color map under the Quick Map node, with a gradient from dark gold to light gold.

I duplicated this layer twice. On the first duplicate, I exchanged the Earth image with an image of the outline of the Earth and then increased the number of particles and size of these. The second duplicate, and animated to get larger over time. Both of these layers and their rotational axis linked to the first layer, so that all would rotate together.

I then duplicated the original layer again, but removed the mapping. I then expanded the layer to 650 x 650 x 650 and changed the number of particles in Y to 5. This created my latitudinal lines.

I duplicated the latitudinal layer, and then changed the Y to 200 and the X particles to 24 to create longitudinal lines. The longitude I then linked to the rotational axis of the original layer, while telling the latitude to rotate at x * (- 15) to create a varying some movement from the rest. 

For the interior sparks, I utilized Trapcode particular with it's Aux function to create the center slowly emitting particles. These too, I linked to the original layer's rotation.

The background I made a very dark purple. I then created a lens flare, to which I applied a tint and a gold gradient. I set a wiggle script to control the flare intensity. Opposite the flare, I created a lighter purple shape layer, and masked it with a heavy feather to give a nice complimentary color to the gold.

I then experimented with three different cameras, each of which I heavily changed the focus, zoom, and aperture to create the bluring effects.

Future Ideas:

I really like what I got out of this project and I can really see that it offers a lot of potential. Aside from creating a lot of space inspired imagery, it has opened up to me the possible methods of effects I've seen in other movies. 

One such effect, that I would like to try and create, is from the movie I, Robot. The AI ​​Viki in the movie is what I would like to create. I want to try and use a video of someone talking to create a heavy 3D displacement of a face. The particles would be made up the video itself, as it would reinforce the effect. It creates a very unique and strong impression, however in order to create the effect, I would need possible green screens, and high contrast lighting - which is not available to me at this time. So I'll have to shelve that project for later.

Project Notes: Flat Design Clock

Description:

This project initially started off a real quick look at a technique I saw featured during the past week's Adobe Creative Cloud Live demonstration; and it quickly turned into a full blown project / tutorial in flat design. The animation itself is quite simple, but covers a bunch of really important design concepts and techniques that I can apply to future projects.

A key focus in this project was simplicity. Many of my projects in the past could get bogged down with many layers, keyframes, and effects. This would mean that if a client wanted something changed, I might have to go back and edit everything. The project as it is set up had a minimal number of layers and keyframes, which would allow for easy manipulation.

Ultimately, this was about setting the project up for success later on.

Clock Face:

The first piece created here was the clock face. Immediately, I changed up my normal method of creating a circle. I double clicked the ellipse tool to draw an ellipse, then went and changed the size of the path to 500 px X 500 px. I then duplicated the ellipse within the layer and edited the second path size to 420 px X 420 px. With the two paths created, I then merged the paths together, and changed the mode to Subtract.

The result here was that I had the white ring of the clock, in one layers as opposed to two. As well, I avoided using any masks which can present problems down the way. As well, because these were paths, I could animate the size of the paths. And with the way they were created (manipulating the path size), all attributes to the shape layer were still at 0. This would be important for later animating.

I then created a quick animation in each path's respective size to 0 - max. I set the keyframes to easy-ease and then entered the graph editor. Here I edited the value graphs, so that I could add an overshoot, to add a little bounce.

To create the clock face itself, I duplicated the circle layer (aptly named "Good Circle), and deleted the second path within it. I then turned off the animation on this new layer. I instead alt-clicked the stop watch on the path's size icon to create an expression and pick-whip linked it's size to the size of the first path (500px) of the Good Circle. This ensured that the size would always match the Good Circle, and required no keyframes. If I was to need to edit anything about the animation of the clock face, it would all be able to controlled from that one keyframe in Good Circle, as opposed to multiple keyframes on multiple layers. Very simple, and I wish I knew about this before.

Outside Shadow:

Creating the shadow was quite interesting and eye-opening as well. I began by duplicating the Good Circle layer, and renaming it Outside Shadow. Within the contents, I deleted the paths, expect the 500px path. I then duplicated that path so that I would have two circles. I used the >add function within the shape layer to add a rectangular path.

So I now had underneath the contents tab: Shadow group, which contained: "Outside" circle 1, "Outside 2" circle 2, and rectangle 1 paths.

I pick-whip linked the size of "Outside" circle 1 to "Good Circle"'s ellipse path 1 size. This would keep the first part of the shadow linked to the current size of the the clock face. I did the same for "Outside 2" circle 2.

Within the content box of "Outside 2", I keyed the position transform in two places. At frame 24, it was set to [0,0], and twenty frames later I set it to [0,600]. Here I then set the keys to easy-ease, and entered the graph editor and edited the speed graph this time. Because I did not want any overshoots here, I wanted to use the speed graph and have the shadow shoot out and then ease to a stop.

This left the rectangle to deal with, which would bridge the gap between the two circles, and fill in that space. For the size, I pointed the x value to  "Outside 2" size [0] and the y value to "Outside 2" position [1].

x=content("Shadow").content("Outside 2").size[0];
y=content("Shadow").content("Outside 2").position[1];
[x,y];

This would keep the width of the rectangle equal to the Good Circle size, but would automatically change the length to match the second circle. This allowed me to avoid adding any keyframes to create the effect.

For the position I applied another script which would adjust the location of the rectangle to ensure it properly matched with the second circle:

x=0;
y=content("Shadow").content("Rectangle Path 1").size[1]/2;
[x,y];

On this layer, I then applied a rectangular mask towards the bottom of the shadow and feathered it to create a gradient. Because all transformations were done within the paths, the layer had no transformations or input, and I was able to easy rotate the shadow to -45 degrees, with all shapes following accordingly (no compounding effects).

Inner Shadow:

The inner shadow of the clock was made quite simply. I duplicated the Outside Shadow layer, then I opened up the contents and deleted the second ellipse and rectangle paths. I then created a new ellipse with a size of 420 px. I then merged the paths of the two paths and set the 420 px path mode to subtract. I then offset the position by 25. Because of duplicating the Outside Shadow, it inherited all the scripts and transformations.

Dial:

To create the center dial, I created a new shape layer, starting with an ellipse. I set the ellipse path size to 50 px. I then created two rectangle paths within the shape layer, one for a second hand, and another for the hour hand. I then set the position so that the center lined up with the center of the dial. I then grouped these paths together to create an extra to allow me to animate rotations of the objects separate from anything else going on.

To animate the hands, I first selected the minute hand as the driver and scripted the rotation to (time*100). I then pick-whip connected the rotation of the hour hand to the rotation of the minute hand / 12 to create an accurate clock animation.

content("Dial").content("Big_Hand").transform.rotation/12;

If I wanted, I would be able to manually key the minute hand, and the hour hand would follow accordingly.

I then applied a script to the size of the layer so that it would match the growth of the interior path of Good Circle.

thisComp.layer("Good_Circle").content("Ellipse 1").content("Ellipse Path 1").size/4

To create the shadow for the Dial, I utilized a different technique. I duplicated the Dial layer and then put it underneath that layer. I then went into the >add node within the contents of the layer and added a repeater function that I placed underneath the shape paths. I set the repeater to offset at [1,1] and duplicate 10 times. I then offset the total position by 25 to create a clean and continuous shadow.

Text:

The text I decided to add on my own and experiment with a few of the things I'd already picked up in this project. I decided I wanted to create a shadow for my text much like how I had for the clock. The Adobe Live went through a method where I would hand draw the shadow for the letter. Because I had an entire line of text, I said "No. That is way to much work." So I found a much better and more efficient way. Work smarter, not harder.

So I first set up the animate in of the letters. I enabled per-character 3D. I set the mode to ramp up and set the scale to 0. I then animated the start from 0 to 100% and pick-whip influenced the offset to the start. Then I set the keys to Easy Ease and manipulated the speed graphs to have the characters zoom in and then settle slow.

To create the shadow, I duplicated my text layer, and then converted text to shape layers. This was needed to be done so that I could then add a repeater later on. I added a drop shadow effect and animated the distance to go from 0 to 1. I then added in a repeater, and animated the repeater from 0 to 20 over the same time frame to create the growing shadow effect.

Color:

I decided to follow the guides that Adobe Live advised. Flat design (and design in general) should stick to a simple color palate, and should exhibit no more than 5 colors. 5 colors is what I stuck to. The background is blue color, and the shadows are a darker blue. The tan is complimentary to the blue. The white and black then add the extreme contrast that helps tie the composition together.

Conclusions:

For such an admittedly simple piece, I am really quite pleased with the result. I feel that it looks more professional than some of my other pieces, and the techniques I picked up from this I can put to great use further on down the road. I am also very pleased how I was able to simplify the project file and animation to be easier to work with. I'm excited to see how I can apply these ideas to bigger projects.