McElroy Films is very pleased to announce our new 2009 3D corporate logo. We contacted Will Cavanagh, a graphics design artist working at National Boston to undertake the task.

Will was kind enough to discuss his experience and workflow:

After discussing the animation with Ben McElroy, I spent some time conceptualizing how the logo should build.  I decided on a grand build into an elegent resolve, that relied on showing off the geometry of the logo in an abstract way to engage the viewer.  I drew some rough boards, and then began modelling the logo in 3d.  I used Adobe Illustrator to clean up the logo file, remove unneeded elements, and prep it to import into 3d.  I then modeled the filmstrip bit from the vector art in Maxon Cinema 4D, and extruded the text.

I animated the camera move roughly, and then worked on designing materials and lighting to enhance the scene. I tweaked the camera animation, and added additional cameras (for shots used in the build) and animated them as well.  I used Maxon Cinema 4D NET Render to render the scene across an 11-machine render farm of 8-core Mac Pros.  This additional render power allowed me to use GI with HDRI lighting in the scene to add softness in the shadows and realism to the reflections, specularity and caustics.  I rendered the scenes into 24 seperate passes, as image sequences.

I pulled the passes I wished to use for composite into Adobe After Effects, and using the multi-pass output from 3d tweaked the appearance of the materials to my liking.  I used Object Buffer alpha channels to isolate the alpha of the logo elements from the scene, and to replace the background with color mattes.  For part of the animation I used the Trapcode Horizon plugin for AE to allow the background gradation to match the camera movement pulled from 3d.  Since C4D is able to export camera and scene information to After Effects, matching the camera movement from 3d in composite is painless, without having to work in a heavier-duty compositor like The Foundry’s Nuke.

I added lens flares using Knoll Light Factory, and also added vignetteing and some additional toning to the composition in AE.  To end the animation, I built a transition from the 3d animation to a 2d logo resolve using a tweaked vector art version of the McElroy Films logo.

– Will Cavanagh

To see the logo in full animation click here