I wanted to go through the latest logo animation we've been working on here. This is a narrated breakdown of the process for those of you who may be interested, because I want to focus on talking about the "how to" process a little more than I usually do.

I originally wanted to make a SALSA logo. For those of you who don't know, SALSA is the Southern Arizona Limb Salvage Alliance. A few years ago, we made this logo as a 3D printable file on thingiverse. Here's shot of the entry as it stands today. It's been downloaded a handful of times. I honestly didn't think there would be that many people interested in SALSA & 3D printing, but I suppose wrong.

For this animation, the original mesh was brought back into Lightwave 3D and modified to include some beveled edges and improved geometry of the rounder edges. Making something print and something that can be animated are similar, but not always optimized in the same way.

As a matter of fact, I'd love to plug a book which taught me a great deal about these concepts. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321...

Its a nondenominational book by William "Proton" Vaughan. He's a Lightwave wizard and details a number of really good techniques for modeling and improving skills. He's active in a number of user groups around the interwebz and an advocate for Newtek on this product. He's also helped my troubleshoot a few issues in the past, so I'm obviously a big and grateful fan as a result.

Anyway, here are a few screenshots of the iterations along the way. We got something we were happy with and could actually be rendered well. I wanted to make a scene that had a strong depth of field effect, but this first version didn't go so well. It was too blurry at times and seemed like one of those cloudy dream states, rather than the focusing effect that I wanted. In fact, I wanted to redo it, but didn't have time before using it at the Diabetic Global Foot conference.

However, not that I had a little more time, I reworked that scene with a weaker depth effect, and improved camera motions. I also added a few dutch angles, changed the light effects to give off a little glint on the surfaces here on the head of the salsaman, as well as here on the red plus in the middle segment, and finally here coming off the blue box. It really makes it seem like a tangible object when you do the slight touches, compared to how it started out.

I also made some smother pulls towards the end, so the camera wasn't jerking around as much. You can see this clip in the original, where it seems to be yanking the viewers head around to watch, Versus this one in the end which seems to lift and slide. Much, much smoother in my opinion.

I also added a few sound effects from the www.freesound.org resource. Very neat little site that is plenty useful for these projects that I've done before. The final version at 1080p and 2500 samples in Octane renderer took nearly an hour per frame on my "little laptop that could" setup here.

The final result is pretty good, but I still can't figure out why these little corners show up here on the edge of the screen. It's not a deal breaker, or I would have rerendered that part of the scene again, but I suspect its something to do with the surfacing texture between Lightwave and Octane that I didn't get straightened out the first time around.

Either way, I hope you like it and I always enjoy the opportunity to do something creative once in a while that isn't so dry or unipurposed in my channel. Thanks again youtube!

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