Animated Indiana Jones Travel Arrow
by Rob Maples
on
Aug 28, 2008 at 1:22:22 pm
Hey all,
I've been tasked with creating a red arrow to show the journey of our latest addition here at the Georgia Aquarium. Nandi, our new manta ray, was flown from Durban, South Africa to Atlanta, GA in a 13 hour flight.
I've done animated travel map-type things before, but I've always used flat maps. My boss has asked me to use a 3D spinning globe animation that we bought off of ArtBeats (I Think.) to throw the arrow on top of.
What would be the best way to add the arrow in 3D space? Meaning, as the globe turns, I want the arrow to to stay attached to it's points (Beginning, fuel stop, destination) as they spin around. I thought I remembered a motion mapping tool in AE, would this work for me? Maybe I could pin each main point to a particular piece of the animation and AE can extrapolate motion based on that??
I hope all this makes sense, if not, I can try to explain better.
Re: Animated Indiana Jones Travel Arrow by John Cuevas on Aug 28, 2008 at 4:07:08 pm
I've had to recreate that effect in the past and the way I've always done it is to create my own globe, using a flat map, animating the red line then bringing it into a new comp and using CCSphere. That's much easier than trying to match to the time of video.
If you are locked into using video, I'd still go about it much the same way, but it would require some finese. Make a large comp, 2000x500 and create black solid. Use a mask and apply a stroke, animate the end point to give yourself a reference.
Drop this comp onto the globe footate. Apply the CCSphere effect, change the radius to match globe, set the rotation to match globe. Next, use Add transfer, unmult or a shift channel effect to overlay this stroke on to the globe.
Finally, open up the original comp in a second window and add vertexes and adjust the keyframes so the line will move as you need.
Re: Animated Indiana Jones Travel Arrow by david bogie on Aug 28, 2008 at 6:29:54 pm
Using the Render setting in CC Sphere it is possible to place one sphere object inside another as long as the layers are different scales. They are flat layers, remember, not 3D. You're just stacking them in order:
Top layer is the travel line set to render outside.
Next layer is the surface of the world to which you have applied CCSphere.
Bottom layer is another copy of your travel arrow set to render inside. You may not need this layer unless you want to show the arrow wrapping aournd behind the globe. You can feather a mask iat the edges of the globe layer to enhance the illusion that there is atmosphere.
an expression links all rotation together, modifying the expression for the arrow layers by multiplying by a number slightly greater than one will enhance the illusion of separation between the objects.
One more thing that everyone who animates globes screws up: The Earth rotates west to east. The sun rises on the eastern seaboard of the US before it rises in California. (PBD GlobeTrekker series has their entire logo, opens, closes and credits using a globe that is spinning backwards, idiots.)
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: "For crying out loud, read the freakin' manual."
Re: Animated Indiana Jones Travel Arrow by Rob Maples on Aug 29, 2008 at 6:22:36 pm
John,
Thanks for your reply. The flat map and CCSphere effect did the trick.
I took it one step further and suspended my newly created globe in Space. Using the skybox tutorial on the AE Podcasts section, I took a fractal image and made the starmap, after rendering it on the inside of a sphere and taking it's radius larger than the globe's radius I had some fun.
In the tut he speaks of using a 3D enabled layer to move a camera around, and locking the star maps position to that of the camera in 3d space. This method was not working for me as when I turned my globe precomp into a 3D enabled layer, it was still just the flat version, not providing me with the rotation aronud the globe I needed. After reading up on expressions and thinking threw it for a moment I came up with the following...:
Simulate a 3D Camera move in space by using the CC Sphere's rotation and radius properties to replace pan/tilt/zoom.
After getting the Globe to spin in the direction and speed desired, it was time to make the star map move appropriately.
I tied the starmap's ccsphere rotation props to the rotation props on globe. The result was the desired "camera move" simulating an orbital view of the globe and traversing journey.
Re: Animated Indiana Jones Travel Arrow by John Cuevas on Aug 29, 2008 at 7:27:47 pm
Like it a lot---I'm going to have to use the rotating starfield, that looks pretty cool. LOL-I've watched it like 5 times, really really like tieing the starfield to the planet rotation-dang why didn't I think of that.
