In this tutorial, you will create a 3D animated logo. You will learn how to:

• use Maya’s project system.
• import curves from vector art files.
• use the Loft and Planar surface modeling tools.
• use Maya’s Bevel Plus to expand it.
• set keyframes to make the logo spin.

Animated logos are fairly simple creations that are used in a variety of places: corporate presentations, broadcast design for television, motion design for DVD’s, and intros for motion pictures. In fact, design firms like Troika and Cinemagic exist to create motion designs. For example, Troika crafted ESPN SportsCenter's latest Revolution theme:

But why should you care? They can provide a lot of impact for your work. They can make you look cool. And, in front of an audience, they’ll recognize you as a sophisticated nerd, setting you apart from all the other regular Powerpoint nerds. Let them grind their teeth at Powerpoint’s useless primitive whooshing animations! Grind! Grind!

For The Play 3D, I styled the logo’s shape to look similar to the show Late Night with David Letterman, with a typeface that took on the style of those “COLLEGE” shirts you see around campus. And yes, I used blue and gold. Here at Cal, there’s no end to the huge honkin’ mustard “BERKELEY” word pasted on dark-blue shirts. Alas, I fell victim to this color scheme tyranny.

Download this file archive. It contains all of the project files.

Create the Logo’s Curves

1. In Adobe Illustrator, clean up your logo.
   —Convert all of your type to shapes, since Maya only cares about curves, not text information (Select > Object > Text Objects, then Type > Create Outlines (Cmd-Shift-O)).
   —Set the Fill color for all objects to Transparent.
   
2. Export the file in Adobe Illustrator 3 EPS Legacy format.
   —Go to File > Export, enter in “logo.eps” as the filename, and select Adobe Illustrator EPS (Legacy) format. Hit Save.
   —The “Legacy EPS Options” dialog box will pop up.
   
   —Then, in the Version drop-down box, select Illustrator 3 EPS.
   —Under Transparency, if possible, select the Preserve Paths (discard transparency) radio box. This discards all layer styles and does an “Expand Appearance” on all Pathfinder objects, so that Illustrator only has the curves to work with. We only care about the curves.
   —Hit OK.
   —A warning box may pop up that says “Saving this document in an older format may convert all type to point type and may disable some editing features when the document is read back in.” Just hit OK.
3. Quit Illustrator. (Cmd+Q)

Set up the Project

In most instances, your work in Maya will consist of multiple files. Maya organizes all of these files in a Project folder structure, with a folder for textures, and another folder for Maya scenes, and sounds, and scripts, and rendered movies, and rendered images, and more. Yes, Virginia, there are a ton of folders that Maya juggles. (Most professional studios use their own file and folder structures, however. On the animated short Melody’s Flight, project producer Jeremy Huddleston used a very different folder hierarchy, the same one that ESC adopted to create the Matrix Revolutions movie. He essentially created projects for each asset, set, and scene.)

For our work, we’ll use the default folder structure. Set up the project using defaults.

1. Open Maya.
2. Select File > Project > New…. The “New Project” dialog box will pop up.
3. Enter in the name of your project. This will be the name of the folder used. To be on the safe side, do not use spaces or weird characters. I hear that Maya gets messed up if you stick spaces in filenames (particularly Mental Ray).
4. Enter in the location of your project. This is where the folder will be stored.
5. Click the Use Defaults button. Maya will fill in all of the folder names for you. Yay! (See screenshot.)
   
6. Click Accept.

Maya will now use this as your Project folder in all future sessions, until you specify otherwise. You can set your Project anytime with File > Project > Set….

Import the Curves

Now it’s time to import the curves. I would put a long, insightful paragraph here, but importing ain’t that hard. :)

1. Go to File > Import . The “Import Options” dialog box will pop up.
2. Make sure the Group check box is checked. This makes sure that all your curves are stuck in one group.
3. Click Import. A file selector box will pop up.
4. Locate find.eps, select it, and click Import.
5. Your view might not look exactly like this one (I used Window > Saved Layouts > Persp/Outliner). But notice that you have a new group in your Outliner, and the curves now display in the main viewport. Pretty!
   
6. Now’s a good time to save your work with File > Save Scene As… (Cmd+Shift+S), as “scenes/logo001.ma” in Maya ASCII format.

The file archive accompanying this tutorial contains the resulting Maya file, with curves, in logo001.ma.

Create the Spinning Logo using Bevel Plus

Our curves are in 2D, but now we want to make them into a nice 3D shape. We’ll use a simple command, Bevel Plus, to do this magically for us. Bevel Plus takes an existing 2D curve and creates a three-dimensional shape out of it, allowing you to choose how thick the shape is, how thick the edges should be, and what the edges should look like.

1. Select the letter H’s curve.—Use the Select tool (Q) and clicking on H’s outline in the Viewport.
2. Go to Surfaces > Bevel Plus . An option box will pop up.
   
3. Fiddle with the settings to your desire. Here are the options you can fiddle with, also explained in the diagram below:
   —Create Bevel: Do you want to have a fancy bevelled edge at the front, and at the back, of the letter? I left both of these checked since we’ll be spinning the logo.
   —Bevel Width: How thick (in the XY plane) do you want this bevelled edge? I set Bevel Width: 0.1.
   —Bevel Depth: How deep (in the ZY plane) do you want this bevelled edge? I set Bevel Depth: 0.1.
   —Extrude Distance: How deep do you want the whole letter to be? I set Extrude Distance: 0.6.
   —Create Cap: If unchecked, it will leave a gaping hole in the letter. Helps keep neon-like signs, or keeping poly counts low if you never see the back of a letter. I left all of these checked.
   —Outer Bevel Style: How do you want to bevel to look? Best to just play with this. :) For this tutorial, I set this to Convex Corner.
   
4. Once you click Bevel, it will create a new polygon object based off the curve. If you have history turned on, any CV or transform adjustments you make to the curve or its parents will affect the resulting polygon.
5. Repeat the first steps over and over again for each letter. When you come to the letters “P” and “A”, note that there’s a hole in the middle of the letter’s shape. Select the outer curve first, then the hole’s curve, then Bevel Plus it.
   

You should come out with something that looks like this:

Save your work as logo002.ma.

Simple Keyframing: Making the logo spin

We’d like to make the logo spin around so that it will take hold of our short attention spans and bring us pleasing eye candy. Wait, did you want me to write something insightful here? We’re just going to make the logo spin around and around. :)

1. Delete history on the new bevelled letter shapes. Remember how I said that if you move or modify any of the original curves, it’ll change the resulting polygon? We want to make that not happen anymore. This helps because (1) from now on we only care about the new polygon shapes, and (2) deleting history speeds Maya up. Select bevelPolygon1 through bevelPolygon7 in the Outliner (Window > Outliner…) and delete history (Edit > Delete by Type > History).
2. Change the names of the objects to something more meaningful. You can skip this step if you want, but if you’re working on a large project and you’ve got a bunch of logos in your scene spinning around, you’ll have no idea what bevelPolygon refers to. Go to Modify > Search and Replace Names… and set Search For to “bevelPolygon” and set Replace With to “thePlayLetter”. We want this to happen only on the letters we selected, so click on Selected. Click Replace.
3. Group the new polygon shapes (Edit > Group or Cmd+G). Rename this group “thePlay”.
   
4. Turn off Auto keyframe toggle. In the main window’s Range Slider, click on the key-shaped icon so that it’s no longer red and depressed. If you have auto-keyframe on, whenever you move your object, it’ll automatically create a keyframe for it.
5. Set key by pressing S or Animate > Set Key. This will establish the logo’s current position as its starting state. Notice that the Time Slider now has a vertical line on frame 1. This means that there’s a keyframe marked there. Notice also that the attributes in the Channel box have turned into a Tang orange color. This means that these channels are keyframed.
   
6. Move the Time Slider until it’s set at 48. You can manually enter “48” into the box adjacent to the Time Slider.
7. Rotate the “thePlay” group around and around. It’s probably best to manually enter “720” into the Channel box. This means that in 48 frames, our logo will rotate twice (360 degrees per 24 frames, and 24 frames is usually 1 second).
8. Set another key by pressing S or Animate > Set Key.
9. Play back your animation by clicking the Play forwards button in the Time Slider toolbar, or press Option+V. Yay! It rotates! You can also “scrub” the animation by clicking and dragging on the Time Slider. By moving your mouse to the left and to the right, Maya will calculate how the logo should look like for that frame.

Save your work as logo003.ma. You’re done.

Other Objectives for Overachievers

Earn that A+ by going that extra kilometer. Dan will give you 100 extra credit points if you do this.

Motion Blur

You can increase the effect of the animation by setting Motion Blur on in Window > Rendering Editors > Render Globals… window. Believe me. It’ll help you pick up hot guys or girls who are turned on by motion-blurred logos. For UCBUGG’s The Play 3D, I used the values shown in the image.

Batch Render for Compositing

You can place an animated logo in front of your home videos for your children… or maybe even an animated short! Wait, did I say children?

1. Under the camera’s attributes (View > Camera Attribute Editor…), set the render background color to a nauseating green so that you can matte it out (expand the Environment group and click on Background Color’s color).
2. We need to make sure that multiple channels are produced. Under Window > Rendering Editors > Render Globals… , expand the Image File Output group, click Frame/Animation Ext and choose anything that has a pound ”#” sign in it, such as name.#.ext. This represents the number of your frame.
3. Make sure Alpha Channel (Mask) is selected. If possible, use the alpha channel information instead of relying on matting out the neon green color.
4. Now you’re ready to render! Render > Batch Render and, if you are lucky enough to have a dual-processor machine, click Use all Available Processors so that rendering goes faster. Click Batch Render and the batch renderer application will start.
5. You can check the progress of the Batch Render with the Script Editor (Window > General Editors > Script Editor…).

Apply a new material to the logo.

The default shader we’re using is butt-ugly, and you can make it look better by applying a simple Blinn shader and tweaking the colors. I used the exact same Bevel Plus stuff in this tutorial to create Jeremy’s business card:

The set has several lights, shown in white in the wireframe view below:

• an Ambient light (intensity 1.00, ambient shade at 0.450). Ambient lights are nearly always a no-no, but this wasn’t a photorealistic image so I wanted to make elements as bright as possible. Also, it helped cast shadows on the logo.
• a Spotlight (intensity 0.50, with Penumbra Angle at 25 and Cone Angle at 45). This helps create a drop-off gradient effect so that the center letters are brighter than the outer letters.
• a Directional light (intensity 1.00). Also helps with creating shadows and making it look like the glow was coming from beneath.

The shader network is relatively simple:

Paint Effects

You can use Maya’s Paint Effects to create animated lightning, moving glows, and other Photoshop-esque effects in 3D. Or, create the effects in a compositing application, which will give you a bit more control over things (and save you the trouble of having to tweak, render, tweak, and re-render in Maya).

Modify the animation

Our animation is very simplistic. You can change the way it moves so that it accelerates and slowly comes to a halt. To do this, change the tangents of the keyframes’ curves by using the Graph Editor (Window > Animation Editor > Graph Editor…).

Get inspired

One excellent way to grab ideas is to watch TV and movie intro sequences. There is no end to the animated 3D logos in local news in the United States, so you can definitely get some ideas from there. If you’re trying to be original, though, it might not be the best place to look. As you can see, the following three logos look nearly the same.