P O S H   T H U M B N A I L

_{Assets / P o s h}

_{by Ruben Cress}

_{Ruben Cress | New Thumbnail for HivePosh GIF}

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_{S u m m a r y}

<sub>The last couple of days, I've been playing around in After Effects. Mostly, because I was browsing the web to look for Web3-proof design trends. I came across some high-end animations that would cost me days to create. But it gave me the inspiration to create something myself. While playing around with our Hive logo, I remember that @Acidyo posted an update about their new initiative and PROMO token idea. How cool would it be to create something for a project that gives so much back to our community? So, I asked him if he had the logo of POSH in EPS/AI for me to work with.

So, I started working in After Effects and started to think about how to create a 3D-looking coin in 2D with no 3rd party plugins. Trust me, if you know After Effects, you know plugins can be amazing, but sometimes overwhelming or missing that "one" thing you need. Besides, I wanted to keep my skills up-to-date, since they haven't been used for some time.

In this blog post, I'll take you through my process of creating the above. It was a lot of trial and error, and it took me some time to remove any small mistakes that were visible in the final animation. I'm pretty satisfied with it, because it was pretty challenging to get rid of some hard edges. Hope you guys enjoy the screenshots and the GIFs in this post!</sub>

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Starting with just the logo

_{When I just started to work on this project, I imported and used the Hive logo. I'm so lucky to pay attention in class, one of the first things I learned was to make things easily adjustable. You don't want to end up spending a shitton of time on something just to figure out you used the wrong file. The idea behind it, was to be able to use -any- logo for the coin. Feel free to contact me if you need one for your project. I'm accepting HBDs.}

_{Flat outline, ready to be extruded :))}

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Rendertime

_{Rendering everything that you create in After Effects, can take a lot of time. Unless you use less motion in your pixels. Every pixel is calculated per frame. Whereas, if you work in 25FPS, you have to calculate 200 frames for 8 seconds (414.720.000 pixels in total for full HD). Luckily, After Effects is smart enough to identify pixels that don't require updating, for example: if the entire screen was constantly moving, it would take -a lot- of time to bake it into a movie clip, this is why 3D can take days to render 1 frame (reflections, light, moving objects, etc). All 8-second renders took about 30 minutes to finish, all 5-second renders took about 20 minutes to render.}

_{note: renders/gifs below illustrate the process, please don't use}

_{Looking for reflections in the logo, and analyzing the (2) look-and-feel of the movement of the two coins in XYZ-axis}

_{Looking for reflections in the logo, and analyzing the look-and-feel of the movement of the two coins}

_{Adjusting the lighting}

_{Isolating the movement, trying two: 1 rotation versus 3 rotations, analyzing it: it seems off}

_{Removed position animation of the coins, added scale instead (looks way better), re-did the entire lighting scene, adding different light sources, converting background to a 3D layer so it will be illuminated by the lights, and serve as reflection, analyzing color-change to measure impact of colors (and to determine future solid color).}

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Changing the logo

_{Acidyo only had a SVG to work with. Unfortunately, After Effects doesn't recognize this as a vector, so I first had to use Illustrator to isolate the mark inside the POSH logo, that's the part that I wanted to use for the coin. As mentioned above, replacing the logo wasn't much of a hassle. I was curious to see if it would look just as cool as the one with the Hive logo.}

_{Changed lighting, changed background colors, added color-animation, in general: checking out the animation with the replaced POSH logo. Looking for minor bugs, and more potential adjustments. note; absolutely love the darkish red color, but it does need to change back to POSH's magenta-ish color. Second note: lights too far from BG, implies use of vignette (over-used/not subtle).}

_{workflow, 4 views, quarter quality}

_{Animation: 2-second looped coin-rotation-animation, note: too fast -> 3-second loop / 5-second intro-animation instead?}

_{5-second intro-animation, noticed -ONE- single missing gap in the outer ring of both coins which makes the animation annoying to look at when looped}

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Final animations

_{5-second intro-animation, final render!}

_{5-second intro-animation, final render!}

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And that's how it's been made

It took me over a day to create this, lol. Back in the day, I used a rule of thumb; 2 hours of work per 1 or 2 seconds of animation. It takes a lot of time to create something out of nothing. From time to time, I create something and add it to my library of animations, you never know when you can use the same technique. Either way, it was fun to play around in After Effects again. Hopefully, it will be used many times :)

Cheers,
Ruben

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