Don't let the title of this feature scare you away. While this installment, and ones in the future, will take more of a basic approach, just about any animator can find some useful information contained within. On to our first installment.
"TVLogos 101" part I
What I've found more often than not is that while many talented animators out there can crank out way-cool character animation and B-5 style effects, they often lack the simple techniques of good clean logo animation. Why this is, I'm not real sure - but I do know that while it's not nearly as much fun to do good flying logos as it is destroying a starcruiser in deep space, it is a very important aspect of 3D for most animators to learn well. Because for many of us, it's the flying logo that often pays the bills. Yes, I'm talking to you: the budding Lightwave animator trying to break into the logo business in your local Television market. With this in mind, I'd like to spend time in the next few articles discussing some helpful hints on the look and animating of a 3D logo. And by the end I'll have thrown in some additional tips on landing jobs, dealing with clients, and getting paid for your work.
First off, what does a really good clean logo look like? The reason I ask this is because the best way to compete in the business is to compare yourself with the best stuff you see on the tube. Does this mean leeching an idea if it's a good one? Absolutely! I'm not talkin' carbon copy now - I'm talking about observing and incorporating a concept or look into your own design. The networks are paying creative teams huge bucks for concept design, therefore it only makes sense to observe what is current and cutting edge and to capitalize on it if you can. Besides, in many cases, you'll find that an attempt in emulating a look often ends up in creating something unique of your own.
Example of a standard text-logo job in which you are given creative freedom:
Ok. so you've landed a logo job and a wonderful task is given to you. The client doesn't have any specific ideas and wants you to come up with a classy look. Now, let's think: what's the worse we could do? We could do what we see on public access by doing a simple extrusion on a Helvetica font and "viola"! job finished! But we want this to be a repeat customer. So, first we choose a half dozen fonts or so from our font library that we believe could be a real contender for the logo. Next, we go into our word processor and type the client's logo name in a fairly large point size and in each of the font styles we selected. We then print out this page, take a copy to the client, and ask for input on font preference. If you're lucky, you'll get an "I like this one" from your client. If not, show some new selections until one is settled on.
Now we have a font style to work with - what next? Surely you wouldn't think of producing a logo animation with non-beveled text would you? Well, you might be surprised at how many animators would (just watch some local public access). Yes, beveling can be inconvenient at times (especially with some fonts), but I've often noted that it's one of the main elements that define a professional look in a logo. I'm not saying that it's always a must - but at least for me, I end up beveling about 95% of the time. Just try an identical logo with and without bevels and see which one out-classes the other. This probably wouldn't be an issue for discussion if it were always an easy thing to bevel. Some font styles seem to defy beveling with a vengeance. Thin fonts with sharp curves and angles can be particularly agonizing - but we are persistent, so we'll find a way around this dilemma.
First, we'll deal with an example of a font that is too thin to get a good bevel. Common sense tells us to thicken up the font a little bit, but sometimes simply selecting "bold" from the font requester just doesn't cut it. If you need more thickness, here's a little tip that might help. Once you've got an arranged set of font characters (un-extruded at this time) in the font style you've chosen, go to Modeler's multiply menu, and then the bevel control panel, and enter a 'negative' value for the bevel 'inset'. Assuming you've loaded a system font with default settings, let's try a value of -20mm (it can very greatly depending on the font, so do experiment). For the bevel 'shift' value, go ahead and enter 0 for now. What this will do is create an outline around the original text, giving you a thicker font to bevel (side note: make sure you have enough space between each character to accommodate the new thickness).
However, you will first need to select all the points of the newly created outline and make new polygons out of them. This may prove to be tricky in and of itself so, to make things easier, let's undo our outline and go back to the bevel control panel again, only this time, let's enter a value of 100mm for the bevel 'shift'. Same thing happens as before, only this time, you'll be able to grab the outline in one shot from the left (side) view window in Modeler because the newly created points are now shifted 100mm from center. For sake of ease, select the new points and copy them to a new layer where you can now easily make new polygons from them, and thus obtain a thicker font from the original style. At the very least, this newly thickened font can now accept a positive bevel 'inset' value equal to that which we previously did in the negative (for the above example, we could now easily have room for a 20mm inset).
Ok, we've bought ourselves some beveling room but unfortunately (in this example), our font has some other problems that also hinder beveling - that being: sharp angles in which edges are meeting together at angles considerably less than 90 degrees. Letters such as 'w' and 'm' are notorious for this problem. Beveling letters such as these often causes the inset of the bevel to extend well above or below the font.
 Quite simply, this will require manual editing on your part. At the point where these angles meet, you'll need to select that point and move it in whatever direction it takes to lessen the angle enough to get an acceptable bevel.
  Our undo button may get a workout as you experiment to find that magic compromise. The problem associated in doing this is that afterwards, you may have to make additional alterations to the letter to match the look of the new angles. With that problem out of the way, our logo should bevel perfectly. However in our example, this font is throwing us yet another curve ball. You've seen it happen plenty of times: the bevels overlap due to lots of points being bunched up where two edges meet.
 The answer is easy - simply delete the unnecessary points in that area.
  But don't stop there: go ahead and delete all unnecessary points in your logo. Just about any font you import into Modeler will end up with an over-abundance of points in certain areas where they are not required.
 This is a good thing to do if you've got the time. It'll reduce the polygon count when the logo gets extruded and beveled, and thus increase render efficiency.
That's it for this installment. To many of you, I'm sure this is pretty basic stuff - yet still I'm almost mystified at the number of cheesy logo animations I see regularly. And with that, we'll continue to build on this foundation in the next issue, so stay tuned - we've only just begun!
Leo Martin is a full time artist/animator for WCLF TV in Tampa Florida and co-developer of several 3D-related software packages available through Visual Inspirations. Contact him via Email at: leomartin@usa.net and WWW: http://www.vionline.com/clm.
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hy TVLogos 101"? you ask - it's really quite simple. Over the years, I've found that in my training sessions and tutoring of 3D hopefuls, that my training approach often left the student hanging in this area. Usually I wouldn't hear about it 'till several days later when I'd get a call from the trainee asking something along the lines of "how do I get my text to look like those on your reel"? or "how can I get reflections on my logos to look better"? "Wait a minute" I'd think - "I just showed this guy how to deal with multiple morph targets, displacement mapping, and hierarchical character animation and he's asking me about simple logo stuff"!
