Okay, want to create a rotating 3D animated logo?
Great, so are we.
A quick mention, the logo must be an .SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphic for this to work correctly. .
You can import a .png as a plan, however you cannot add 3D geometry to it, for the purposes of this tutorial. (We tried that first and had no luck.)
So how exactly do we turn our flat logo into that animated loop, which can be used for alerts, overlays, and more?
Login to Blender, the best free 3D software out there to create an animated logo from SVG
If you’ve never heard of Blender, well, you’re in for a treat. . Blender is, as the title says, 3D modeling software that is capable of doing both 2D and 3D modeling and animation. This is one of our favorite tools for literally gaming.
So last night (as of the original publication date of this article) we wanted to make our logo 3D and animated.
And turning. So we did!
How long did it take?
Only two hours.
Will it take you two hours? It depends, really. You could play around with the shaders for a while, maybe tweak the camera a bit, who knows… But if you follow this guide to the letter? Hmm… maybe half an hour?
Just remember, save often, Blender crashes quite often when you start doing more complex renderings.
The First Steps: Delete the cube and import the SVG
Welcome to Blender, where your first step for any project is to Delete that cube.
If ever you’ve done 3D design in Blender before, you know this is the initiation into the world of Blender…Blending…Blendy? Whatever! Simply delete the cube.
You can also press X once you have selected the cube. This is a hot key. There are a LOT of hotkeys in Blender, and all of them are very useful. You may find this small tutorial article useful to learn about the most important ones. (We have it checked.)
Next, you need to import the .SVG of your logo.
If this option is not available, you may need to enable it in plugins.
How to enable .SVG import if it is not enabled
- Click Edit
- Select “Preferences”. It has a little gear
- in the search bar, type “svg” minus the quotes
- Make sure it is “checked”
Next : Making the SVG 3D
Before we can make this object 3D, you’ll need to enlarge it. to do this, make sure you are in object mode.
- Select the logo box.
- Next, press “S”
- Press 4, then enter
- If it’s big enough, stop there, otherwise press S again and continue to increase in size. until it’s big enough for you. (It doesn’t matter much, you just need it to be big enough to manipulate.)
Once the scale is big enough, you’ll want to convert it to a mesh.
Once this is done, if you have an odd looking image like the one you see in the webcam portion of our logo, you’ll need to move the individual logo layers on the Z axis to their respective positions that retain the look of your image. However, before we do this, since the mesh conversion created so many strange faces, we need to reduce the number a bit.
To make this easier, you’ll want to apply a modifier to the mesh very quickly. .
The Decimate Modifier – Reducing that absurd face counting to something more manageable.
Decimate Modifier to the rescue!
To get to this window, located in the bottom right of Blender in the default scene “Layout” A scene is a collection of fonts in OBS Studio. It’s what viewers will see when you’re streaming. Plus, just click on the “Wrench” icon with the selected objects. Remember, you still need to be in Object View for this to work.
We had the best luck with “Planar” and set the “angle limit” to 1. This reduced the face count from 538 to only 7! No geometry loss!
Now, you can go into edit mode, select each face and adjust its z-position.
Moving the faces to their places
Heh.
Select a face, you may need to adjust the camera with the middle mouse button.
- Press “G” followed by “Z”
- move the mouse slightly until the face rests in its correct position relative to the rest of the image.
- Repeat for each face.
Make sure Make sure all your layers are in the correct position before continuing!
In our example near the beginning, we forgot one layer and changed what should have been the black ring to that blue color . We’re leaving it as is to serve as a reminder that you can go all the way and have to go back and redo it if you miss it here, so take your time with this step.
Material Settings
Before proceeding to the next step, we strongly recommend setting the “materials” for each object.
A material is a kind of shader that the Blender engine uses to do its magic. With it, you can change the colors to whatever you want, the textures, give it depth, make it shiny, fireproof, transparent, WHATEVER.
For our purposes, we just need to change the color of the material so that it match our brand colors. If you don’t do this now, you’ll have fun selecting each face and deselecting anything you accidentally select. It sucks.
The Base color is what you want.
However, you can take this shader, the “Principaled BDSF” shader, and adjust any and all of the values to your liking. However, we highly recommend checking out the shading tutorials because for a newbie, it doesn’t make any sense.
Match the objects into one and set the origin
The next step will make your life much easier. By pressing “Shift-J”, you can join multiple objects created by a multi-layered SVG into a single object. This makes your life so much easier. You want to do this part AFTER you space each layer, because doing it before will make it much more difficult to select the faces since they all overlap each other.
Also, this will allow the spacing to take place. next step and the logo is not distorted.
You want to set the Origin of your logo at this point. This will allow your logo to swivel around the center of your logo, rather than some random point in space. You want it to rotate, not rotate.
Most likely you want “Origin to Center of Mass (Surface)”, but play around with that. Everyone’s logo is different.
Finally, we’re making it 3D!
With the origin set and the objects attached, we can finally make this logo 3D and make it animated!
To begin, you must be in “Edit Mode”
- Press “A” to select all.
- Press “E” to extrude
- move the mouse up or down. Press Enter when you are happy with the thicknesses.
- Now would be a good time to reset the origin to “Origin to center of mass (volume) if you see the center point is a little off if you want to get a rotation perfect.
YAY, it’s 3D!
Easy right? This part is, sure. But the setup to get to this point isn’t that easy.
We also need a preliminary rotation of the object, or you have to point the camera at it from top to bottom, both result in the same thing.
Pressing 0 on the numpad will allow you to see what the camera sees, which is what is used as the reference point for rendering. Make sure you are pointing at the logo with enough clearance to compensate for the rotation.
3D object animation, straight line! !
With animation, you can pretty much do EVERYTHING you want with your logo. Bounce? Yes. Lamination? Absolutely. Spinning? Yerp!
For the purpose of its T In the tutorial, we just added a twist to the logo.
You’ll notice that at the bottom of the “Design” tab, there’s an animation window. Drag that out a bit. Do you see 250 on the right? Set it to 60 or 120. (Changes the rotation speed while still looking smooth)
We’ll set our animation to run at 30 fps with 60 frames, or 60 fps with 120 frames. Of course, doubling the frames doubles the rendering time. The result is a 2 second clip at 30fps or 60fps respectively. You can also set the fps to 30 for the 120 frame animation for a 4 second loop if you prefer.
Once that is set we can now start animating:
- Make sure the timeline starts at 1.
- Click the “Record” lookup button, which is called “Auto-Embed”.
- Now click 30 and select the object by pressing ” A” if it is not already selected, making sure you are in “Object Mode” at this point.
- Press R, followed by Z and then 90.
- Press Enter to confirm the rotation along the Z axis. If it moves instead of rotates, its origin was not set correctly before. Press Ctrl-Z and redo the origin.
- Click 60 on the timeline, then R, Z, -90 (Trust us, 90 will do the opposite of what you expect).
- Finally, press Shift-E on the timeline and select “Make Cyclic “.
Press the play button and try. If it repeats as you expect, just rendering is left!
Rendering Your Animated Logo in 3D
With everything else done, all you need to do is prepare for rendering animation.
Exciting, right? Great job so far; You are developing a skill that can be very valuable!
And you can stream this skill live on TwitchTwitch is a popular gaming-focused live streaming platform.It is one of the most well-known early streaming platforms and has millions of active streamers and viewers. More or Mixer or any other platform you want. It really is a win-win situation.
Shamelessly don’t worry, we’re almost there. You may have noticed that the camera had that checkerboard pattern, where yours might have been a solid gray. This is intentional and is a prerequisite for having a transparent background for the animation.
The key setting here is in the “movie” tab. Make sure “Transparent” is checked. This will remove the “world box” in Blender.
But before you get down to business and “Shift-F12” to render the animation, there’s one last thing we need to do.
This is where you define your animation settings. rendered . These settings must match the codec, container, and color (RGBA) must be selected. The rest, you can play to your heart’s content. This will show up as a .MOV with transparent frames. This produces the highest quality of all the options.
SAVE NOW OR RISK LOSING ALL YOUR PROGRESS IF BLENDER CRASHES DURING RENDERING!
However, if Blender or your computer crashes before you can rendering is complete, the .mov file is corrupted and cannot be recovered. Saving before processing is considered good practice.
Convert to .Webm to use as a broadcast alert!
You can then use an online .mov to . webm if you want. to use the animation as an alert in streamlabs/Streamelements.
OBSOBS stands for Open Broadcaster Software. It is a powerful free streaming software with many features that make streaming a breeze. More can read .MOV files by default using the media source A source is a media element that is part of a scene. In OBS Studio, there are many different types of sources that capture many different things. • Application Audio Capture (Beta) • Audio Input Capture • Audio Output Capture • Browser • Color Font • Screenshot • Game Capture • Image • Image Slideshow • Media Source • Scene • Text (GDI+) • VLC video source • Video capture device • Window CaptureMore, so this step can be skipped if you’re targeting an animated overlay.
Congratulations! You have successfully created your own animated rotating 3D logo (or other assets)!
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