Homecoming Animation

My HumanIK project was put on hold for about 2 weeks. I was asked by the school to create a homecoming animation that would reveal each of the spirit days during homecoming week. They told me the theme of homecoming was Vegas/ casino themed. They thought of possibly animating a slot machine that would spin and tell people the spirit day via logo or something. The rest was up to me to fill in the ideas that they were vague on. This is the process that I went through to create this animation.

First I talked to my teacher to see if he had any recommendations of what I should do and also what program I should use for this project.(I mainly deal with 3d animation in Maya) He was able to show me a new plugin that our school acquired for Adobe Aftereffects called Element 3d created by the people at video copilot. What Element 3d does is it takes low polygon, high resolution 3d models and incorporates it into Aftereffects and lets it run smoothly and renders quickly.

Then I took started watching the tutorial videos that are provided online by video copilot to learn how to use Element 3d.

After that I jumped right into aftereffects and got my feet wet with Element 3d by first creating an opening scene of money floating around. This was easy to do with the particle replicator that element uses. Next I added the slot machines in the background and was able to put a custom texture on it that my teacher ended up creating.(It ended up looking amazing in the final render!)

One of the problems that I had to brainstorm was how I was going to animate the slot machine because Element did not allow you to animate or move any pieces in/on the 3d model. With the help of my teacher we came up with using a mask that lined up perfectly with the windows on the slot machine and animating a long strip about 200 x 2000 that would scroll through and restart seamlessly. Also by using multiple compositions within each other I was able to create 1 animation and be able to make slight changes so that I could create an animation for each spirit day for a total of 5 days.

After all the setting up was done I was now in the final touch ups of the animation that included adding a simple fade in, lights, text, and the timing of the animation so it all would run smoothly.

So the idea is that it would fade in to the animation you would see text fly by the camera that says "Spirit day" while money is falling down and the camera zooms in on one of the slot machines then starts playing the animation and stopping to show the spirit day by a logo then to clarify I added text that said the spirit day and a short description of what to wear.

The final rendered animation are down below:

                                                                           Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday