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.
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.
make that tutorial nigga!
I’ve got LOADS of tutorials I want to make – I just genuinely don’t get time to do anything like that at the moment. I wish I did, but for now it’s all work-work-work…
Hey, love the effect! Do you have tutorial on how to do the lamp in 3ds max? (:
Thanks Jasmine. I’m launching a new version of my site in a few days (hopefully!) and I intend to put more tutorials etc on it, so yeah, I’ll try make a quick genies lamp tutorial when I get a chance. Check back in a week or so and I’ll try get something sorted out!.
hello this looks awesome man…. can you please tell me is there any tutorial how to do this ?
Thank you and cheers
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
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…
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!
Hi,
I love this effect, great work. I’d be really grateful if you could walk me through how you did it?
Cheers
Andrew