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Watery Reflection 3D

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This is the Apple Motion project that demonstrates who the effect in the video below was created.

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Watery Reflection 3D — How To Motion Project

Features: 3D “reflection” (old school) and “light play” on the text as reflection of water surface.

Water surface created as an animated texture and exploits the Distress — Custom Bumps feature of 3D Text in Motion. Character is a square (available in Unicode). Wave action is the Op Art 3 generator with an Underwater filter smoothed out with a Gaussian Blur. The “touchdown” splash is an Emitter of rectangles lined up where the text touches down (very easy to accomplish – even without “looking” at the original – just use the effect in the animation!) Character substance is generic, color blue with opacity set to 50%. Custom Specular finish added to make the surface look “wet”.

Reflected text is a dupe of the original flipped 180º on the X axis and its Appearance – Substance is a Gradient from Transparent to opaque.

A custom specular finish is added to the main text with the same texture as the water to create a reflective lighting over the characters. It’s a bit of a cheat, but it works well. Specular Intensity set way up to 100,000% to get an effective appearance.

The rest is typical Motion stuff – Link to connect the animation of the Main text to the reflected text and another to follow the rotation animation. Etc.

Audio added in Final Cut Pro X from the sound library. Recompressed in QT7Pro to fit YT’s requirement of under 8000kbits/sec (and it looks much worse than the original!)

Font used in the demo video is Sunnydale, a font I created 30 years ago. In this download project, the font has been changed to Proxima Nova and the water character has been changed to Apple Symbols — everything should be compatible with everybody’s setup.

Watery Reflection requires Motion 5.3.2 (may only require 5.3.0+)

More on textures.

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A good place to see all of my effects as well as several tutorials and other demonstrations in use is on my YouTube channel.