retired_paddza

I was working on a technique using gradient maps and inadvertantly came out with a funky animation technique. Just thought I would share as it turned out kind of cool.



<edit> go away siggy [saywhat] </edit>

Blinky2004

Hey that IS cool man, nice one. [righton]

Have you tried it in reverse yet? It would have a "plasma ball" effect.

Smoke420

That's sweet! [righton] MAke a tut make a tut, please? %}
hmm... Mark, we need a begging eyes emotion.... like the sleepy look, but eith flashy cute big anime eyes...? [innocent]

huma

That's an interesting effect,MindBender. I would like to hear how you did it also.

I agree with this. However, I think it should have scrunched up eyes, cartoonish sweatbeads, and two hands clasped like in prayer. The effect should be like a kid say " Pleeeeeeezzzz"

Aesweetie822

tut tut tut!!

that freaking rocks

Stroker

Stuff like this brings a tear to my eye.
That is, if my assumption about how MB did it is correct.

Crap...!
Even if my assumption is wrong, I still think I'm going to cry.

I'm so happy!

huma

You're such a sensitive guy... [innocent]

maximumfitness

nice effect there, i'd like to use it

retired_paddza

Wow, much more of a response than I'd planned. heh... I can give you a quick run through on the technique:

The real secret is building a good gradient map. That is what really makes this technique work. What I did was built a gradient that was black on both ends, white in the center and had the midpointsliders on either side of the white be only 5% away from the white color stop. I used this as a gradient map adjustment layer at the top of my laper stack. The next one up was a hue/sat/colorize adjust layer to make it a nicer color than black and white.

Underneath all that I typed some text in a nice rounded font (I used VAG Rounded). I duplicated this and applied some layer styles to the text to give it a glassy black look and moved this layer to the top of the stack so it would be unaffected by the gradient map and the hue/sat.

The bottom text layer I rasterized. I duplicated that layer and ran a gaussian blur of about 3 pixels on it. Then I duplicated that blurred layer and blurred again. I repeated this procedure a bunch of times. That is what made it grow out of (or into) the letters. When I went to animate the effect, I realized that the effect became less and less different on each blur (makes sense if you think about it) so I started playing with painting. I created a new layer under the gradient map layer and painted with a fuzzy white brush. This makes the outline of the brush glow... then I just hit X to switch my white to black and painted away some of the white. Wherever you get grey areas you get glowing color, otherwize it's either black or white. Easier to do than to explain. The last few frames I built (which ended up being the first few in the animation eventually heh) were just freehand painting with the brush to make it look a little more chaotic since the gaussian blurring was creating too regular a pattern.

After all that, I went to imageready and just layed it out one layer at a time. The trick there is to make sure ONLY one layer is on at once, or the blurs combine into a heavier blur and it changes the effect. Not that it's bad, but it doesn't cling to the letters when you do that.

Anyway, that's basically the procedure. I can post some screenshots if necessary later, but hopefully you can figure it out if you give it a shot, it's not too hard, just pay attention to the layer order.

retired_paddza

Here are some screenshots for the gradient and layers and such.

This is the gradient I used. Also the layers with the effect for the basic blurred text.