"Latex Letters," a Shade/Shape example

Copyright 2010 RE:Vision Effects, Inc.

NOTE: We've included the example with both the Shade/Shape Demo AND the real Shade/Shape. Upon loading of the example project please turn off one or the other (but NOT both :-) ) as appropriate.

How'd they do that?

First, in Photoshop, we made some text (with alpha channel) and created a TIFF file. Then we took that same image and blurred it. Using the smudge tool in Photoshop we then created striations on the blurred image (to resemble the stretching of latex), then saved it as a TIFF file

In the After Effects project we made an animated transition from the text to the striated text in the "Bump Map" layer. In order to give a more gloopy feeling, we then animated a blur for the entire bump map layer in "Bump Map Blurred" layer.

In the "Latex" layer we apply Shade/Shape, using bump mapping only. By animating a lighting model from full ambient to a more interesting lighting model, we get an animation that goes from the original picture to a bumpy, latex-ey sort of effect.

Of course you can replace "picture.tiff" with the picture of your choice!

Some notes on examples:

On occasion After Effects can't find the source files (even though they are right there on your disk in the same folder). If this happens to you, use "Replace Footage" in the file menu and replace the footage with the file of the same name in the folder of the example.