How I Made This Thing

I always enjoy finding ways to combine 2D and 3D into a combo project of ultimate fun. I stumbled upon the idea of this project while playing a bit of indoor soccer in my apartment. I was gently passing a soft, bright orange indoor soccer ball to the other end of my living space. I missed my intended target, and the ball rolled under a glass-topped side table next to my couch. When I went to retrieve my shanked shot, I saw a fun visual through the glassy top of the side table. 

The glass-topped side table in question features a ribbed surface that allows the glass to bend the light coming through it. It’s mostly a nice place to keep a lamp and hold a tasty drink. But on this day, it presented a visual treat as the shape of my bright orange soccer ball distorted through the wavy glass, separating it into several individual stripes that mimicked the design of the glass-topped side table. As I moved my vision from side to side, it created an interesting form of movement that I wanted to try to replicate in an animation project. 

To start, I set up a scene in Blender to recreate the distortion effect of the glass. After a few tests, I ended up creating a wall of glass cylinders that I animated moving sideways.

I then added a 2D plane behind the glass cylinders and placed an animated texture of an animation I created in After Effects.

I set up a camera to film through the cylinder wall. The 2D plane with the motion graphics elements projected through the glass cylinders recreated a similar look to my glass-topped side table. 

This little project was a fun exercise in exploring how to achieve a specific look based on a real-life experience. I want to experiment more with this kind of style as it produced an interesting look that I didn’t fully imagine in the end. I really enjoyed the process of seeing how the 3D glassy cylinders affected the 2D animation as it projected through, giving it a super neat look. In the future, I’d like to experiment with different glassy shapes to see how various animations interact with each other.

Plus, it was a good excuse to write a short little song for the final animation!