Smokey Text from a Genies Lamp

Jun 14, 2008 4

For: Andy Shillito | Client: RBS

Categories: 3D, Work

The brief was for a “Genie’s lamp in a cave, with the word ‘You’ coming out of it in big smoke-like letters”. The lamp and cave are all created and rendered in 3D Studio Max, but it proved much easier just to draw the lettering in Photoshop, using a brush and the warp tool, rather than trying to create realistic 3D smoke letters.

You, 3D genie lamp with photoshop smoke lettering

I think the text works quite well, if anyone out there is interested in knowing how to get smokey text like that let me know and I’ll put up a quick tutorial on how I did it.

4 Responses to “Smokey Text from a Genies Lamp”

  1. annzs says:
    September 11, 2009 at 10:29 pm

    hello this looks awesome man…. can you please tell me is there any tutorial how to do this ?

    Thank you and cheers

    Reply
  2. Scott Banks says:
    April 14, 2009 at 1:30 am

    I’m working on a title for a video named “Mt Zen” and I want smoke blowing out of the actors mouth to form smoke letters…. I would need to do the smoke as a transparency letters and add them to the talent shots as a composite. Would your method work for a composition shot like that? Can you export the letters and retain transparency so it can be applied to back plate?

    I really dig this work it is the best I have seen and I have looked.

    Thanks,
    Scott

    Reply
    • Rich says:
      April 18, 2009 at 11:24 pm

      Hi Scott. There’s no reason the way I did it wouldn’t work, but it would be a very slow process to animate it using the exact workflow I used.

      I’ve clearly not got round to doing a little ‘how-to’ for this yet :) – but the basic steps involved (using a budget Wacom Volito II and Photoshop) were…

      1. Create a new layer and sketch out the word and it’s basic form using a basic round brush with slighly feathered edges and slightly varying amounts of transparency
      2. Duplicate that layer a few times, setting the opacity of one ‘main’ version of it to say 75%, then the others at around 5%, so they just add a bit of depth and interest after you’ve done the next step
      3. Open the Liquify Filter (Ctrl + Shift + x on a PC) and go wild and experiment with it
      4. Persevere. My first attempt at smoke lettering wasn’t quite right, so I just kept un-doing and re-doing the Liquify effect on multiple copies of the text until it looked half decent and quite natural

      So, if you were doing that for 24 frames for every second of your animation you’d be there for a while.

      Chances are (if you’re using After Effetcs?) you may be able to replicate something similar using a few copies of the text layer with some of AE’s warp type filters applied? At least that should get you a fairly convincing smokey, shimmering letter effect – maybe :)

      As for having the letters form themselves from thin air as the actors are speaking I’m not sure how I’d go about that. I think my first port of call would be to experiment with Trapcode Particular.

      Anyway, hope that helps a bit Scott!

      Reply
  3. andrew bainbridge says:
    September 8, 2008 at 11:38 pm

    Hi,

    I love this effect, great work. I’d be really grateful if you could walk me through how you did it?

    Cheers

    Andrew

    Reply

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