UntamableTablez, a gaming youtuber, held a small contest for a discord banner, giving me the perfect excuse to try some 3D graphic design again. There was no given direction other than “something fresh” and what’s fresher than the outer reaches of space. To match, I made a sharp sci-fy twist to the original logo. I ended up with this:
The gif was originally rendered at 768p to fit the discord 10mb size limit but re-rendered at 480p to fit online. Either way, not much detail lost but the full res is on Cara if you still want to see it.
Modelling/Curves:
The UT logo is just one big extruded and beveled curve. I had to be pretty precise about the spacing and values.
The D2S logo is just Eras Bold Italic text. I used a lattice to make it follow the circular curve because I refused to do retopology. If I gave myself more time, I’d definitely try to make this more interesting looking.
World:
Luckily the nodes are small enough to fit in a screenshot this time lol. All of the green keyframe inputs on the nodes have Sin wave modifiers on them to make the properties loop every 60-ish frames. It adds some slight movement to the nebulas and it adds brightness and some movement to the stars.
Lighting:
I tried to be precise with the light placement, so the colors form nice gradients on the flat parts. I also made some use of light-linking by having that last yellow light only shine on the “T.”
Effects:
Both the ring of light and the comet are planes with procedural gradients and are animated manually. To fake the comet flying through the hole I just have it snap behind the logo after it crosses the center.
Particle Simulation: The stars that flash out are part of this zero gravity emission simulation. The material is a single Voronoi star that fades by dividing the age by the lifetime, both from the particle info node.
I could delve more into the materials and stuff but luckily the blend file is small enough to send here so feel free to take a look. Seems even for short projects i have lots to say so thanks for readin’
untitled-2.blend (2.3 MB)
P.S. Everyone that entered the contest won so… hooray?