Test glass appearing

In our film there is a scene where we have a drinking glass appearing and disappearing, but want it to materialise as it is appearing and then dematerialise after our character has finished drinking from it. However, I could not find any references on how can you make objects materialise and dematerialise but I had a rough idea on how to do it. I thought that I should at least test out my idea of how I think it could be done to show if it works or not.

So I did some test footage. Firstly I recorded two different videos.

1 –  Plain and no glass.

2 – With glass.

– Note that I didn’t move the camera at all while I recorded this.

I then took it to Adobe After Effects and placed the two videos into the composite.

In After Effects I changed the opacity levels of the cup. After doing this I then noticed that there was a light difference in lighting which made the change very noticeable. To get around this problem I decided to draw masks around the cup to make remove the sudden lighting change.

Maskes around the cup.
Mask’s around the cup.

After doing this I then started to do my animations around the cup and these were my results.

 

Glass assembling one ring
Glass assembling one ring

With this test, I really liked the how the rings looked and how I made them look like that they were going around the cup. However, I did feel that one ring was very underwhelming and not really impressive.

Glass assembling multi rings
Glass assembling multi rings

So I decided to duplicate that ring over and distanced them out over five frames to create this effect which I do feel is much more impressive and is visually pleasing.

Glass Assembling Star Trek style.
Glass Assembling Star Trek style.

While I was watching the tutorial ‘Animated polygon’ done by the fantastic Andrew Kramer. http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/animated_polygon/

it taught me how to create cool effects by using a gradient and the effect time displacement map that is built within After Effects and thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if I tried to apply that effect to my rings and this is the effect. I personally think it is so cool and looks almost like the effects used in Star Trek when they want to beam someone up to the spaceship.

Glass assembling Star Trek multi rings
Glass assembling Star Trek multi rings

Once again I thought it would be interesting if I duplicated that ring over and over and spaced them out over five frames per second and this is the effect. Personally I really like this effect as it is very unique and really fits the aesthetics and I feel like it gives the effect that the cup and water is being created.

Glass Assembling one half ring
Glass Assembling one half ring
Glass Assembling half ring multi
Glass Assembling half ring multi

With the half ring effects I was not too impressed with them and they were not as impressive as the Star Treky versions but thought I would add them in just to show that this is what they looked like. I feel the reason why they do not work is that they are half rings and do not look aesthetically pleasing.

Once again I posted my test versions to LSFM digibods to get feedback to see where I could possibly improve and to see if anyone else like the star treky version.

Samantha Dos Santos Feedback
Samantha Dos Santos Feedback
Jas Hughes feedback
Jas Hughes feedback

Following on from this feedback, I feel like I should experiment more with the star treky version as seemed to be the one that everyone liked and has potential to grow into something. As well when filming I want to address the noise of the camera in the original footage to make that tidier and less noise on screen. Furthermore, I want to do this method next time which is

table > empty cup > water in cup

to see what happens and to give me more animation to make the glass appear and water molecules form to become water which could be quite cool.

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