In After Effects, you can create some really cool effects and art, particularly with lettering. I learned how to create the effect of letter carved in stone, which I think would be a really cool way to create a title sequence for a fantasy intro.
Demo
Firstly, find a suitable stone texture. This should be a high-resolution image with a stone that isn’t too dark or light – so that the letters can be seen. Open this in photoshop and name the layer ‘stone texture’.
Once that’s done, create a text layer to go on top of this, and write down what you want carved in stone, in black. A suitable font would be Old English Text MT, and the size depends on how much you write, and how much negative space you would like. This is optional, but I centred the text and moved it to the very middle of the stone texture (it can be anywhere on the stone and it does not have to be straight). With the text layer still selected, reduce the fill option (above the layers panel) to 0%. The text will disappear for now.
Next, select the fx icon and go to belevel emboss. Once that is clicked, a layer styles window should pop up, where you tweak a few of the settings. Where it says ‘technique’, choose ‘chisel hard’, make the direction ‘down’, and the size to 43px.
Next, untick the global lightbox, and change the angle to 68 degrees, the altitude to 32 degrees and the opacity to 100%. These settings really delve into the details of the carving – everything from the slant and direction of the letters, to the lighting and depth.
On the left of the fx panel select the drop shadow tick box and then click on it to open up the options for this layer style, untick the global lightbox, and change the angle to (-139 degrees).
The final steps within the layers panel are: change the distance to 5%, the Spread to 3%, and the size to 5%. Press ok!
After this, a snapshot of the composition needs to be taken. I had no trouble with this step, but for some people, I noticed that it didn’t work. All that you need to do is select the top layer and press (Ctrl + Shift + Alt + E), which will make a new layer on top of the text pop up, with a shot of the whole composition so far. With it still selected, make a copy of the layer (Ctrl + J), and hide the copy by clicking on the eye. This is so that, if the next step goes wrong, you can delete the layer, and create another copy of the snapshot.
Here is the final fun part – where we add the light! At the top of the screen, go into ‘filter’, ‘render’ and then click ‘lighting effects’. After a few seconds, the lighting effect will appear, along with the guidelines (two giant ovals with a few dots and circles). Make sure that the spotlight is chosen, it should be by default anyway, if not select it through the menu in the lighting options. From here on out, it’s essentially freestyle, and you could experiment with the different options of the light, as well as the position. What I did, was set the ambience in the lighting effects panel to 15, the intensity to 69, the hotspot to 91 and the gloss to 100. I then clicked on the smallest ring, and moved it to the top right-hand corner of the page, so that the brightest light was coming from that direction. You can really experiment with the oval guidelines, and make the light wider, or thinner like a spotlight, or change the angle/position. After this is done, and the light is to your liking, make the top layer visible again and select it.
Create a mask. This can be done by clicking on the little camera icon on the bottom. A small screen appears next to the image of the layer, which indicates that there is a mask on top. Invert it, by clicking ctrl + I.
Grab the brush tool. In the options, make the size 1100px and the hardness 0%. For the final step, ensure the white fill at the bottom of the tools colour is selected, and with the brush selected click once on the top right of the image where the light is the brightest, essentially masking out some of the lighting, making it less bright. And that’s it! I think that this was actually an easy process. Looking back, some of the steps are quite basic and easy to figure out if you know your way around Photoshop (which I do a little better now). I wouldn’t have known which options to change in the layers style window, however, nor by how much.
Here is the finished look of mine:
In my opinion, although it looks super cool, and the effect works really well with that specific texture and font, I think that I made it too pale. I would like the indents to be deeper, and darker so that it is more obvious what the writing says. This has definitely got to do with some of the settings in ‘layer styles’, so I have to spend some time changing them, and experimenting with combinations to see what works best. Another thing that I would also like to try out, is changing the light, and adding things ontop. For example, I would like to see a different stone texture, with coloured lighting (like red to be foreboding), and some cracks and fissures ontop. A bonus would be if there is debris flying in the win, which would involve moving this to after-effects. Overall, I want to try this skill with the pre-production of my title sequence and see what sort of effect could be created with different colours and add ons. I think the hardest part of this would be trying to animate the letters.
After learning the basic steps for how to achieve the effect, we then went on to recreate it with our own coats of arms. Since the quote I used was from Pirates of the Caribbean, I decided to stick with the theme and go for a pirate coat of arms. However, none of the ones on google matched what I wanted – and the ones that did were either terrible quality or not in black. So, it was determined that I would be making one myself. Instead of going from scratch, however, which I knew would take me far too long, I decided to find ones I did like, and put them together to form a coat of arms with all of the elements that I liked. I knew that I certainly wanted a skull and banner, but I found one with wings and decided to add them as well, to represent the freedom that pirates have sailing the seas, and also because they look really cool! Positioning them on top of each other in Illustrator wasn’t hard to do, but adding in all of the details in black (especially the wings) took longer than I thought. Even so, I do not regret picking out all of those elements because my coat of arms looked epic at the end.
As for the texture to place it on – I wanted to go for something different than stone, although looking back now, I think that may have been a better decision. I decided to go for black wood as if it was engraved onto the side of a pirate ship. Engraving into wood has a different effect though, and I didn’t think this entirely through, so if I could go back, I would change this. It was also quite difficult finding a good image of black wood – since most of them didn’t look foreboding enough, or were just too polished and perfect. I also had to keep in mind that the hull of a shift isn’t solid, smooth wood – but horizontal planks. I eventually did find a suitable image and started to follow the steps as before, but I ran into an even bigger problem.
I forgot, or perhaps just didn’t acknowledge, that most of my coat of arms, is white. And the white parts don’t really show up – but the black parts don’t either if they’re too small. I had hoped that, since I had all of the details in black, you would be able to tell what was what, but it turns out that they were far too small and they didn’t show up at all, so the skull and wings basically disappeared. I was really frustrated and knew that there was no time to go back and make such major changes. I also knew that going into the settings would not help, since they are only for the parts that are carved in, not for the parts that aren’t. We were also about to run out of time for the lesson, so I took a screenshot of what I had so far, and stopped there. My mistake was definitely going for something too detailed when the instructions we were given were for something a bit more simplistic. I will consider this in the future when I attempt another drawing or image in this style, but I am also curious to see if there is a way to include small details like that into a carving. I will try and find a youtube video which shows how to do this so that I can attempt it with things that have small lines and thin sections. Overall, I am happy I attempted to do my coat of arms so that I could see how to work with something other than text, and what sort of things to avoid. I plan to use this method when creating concepts/pre-production for the brief because even if I don’t succeed in animating something this way for the title sequence, it will still be cool to see artwork, silhouettes and logos engraved in different textures.