Andrew

Previously, I began revamping the RRSN logo into Blender so I could update our broadcast ID used by our East-Chicago sportscasters. This undertaking spun off the Basketball Replay Video effort I started, and became a website-wide refresh of many different assets on the RRSN.com website.

I wanted a really solid process for bringing text into blender since environments, procedural shaders, hard surface modeling all make a lot of sense to me, where things fall apart is how blender natively handles text, which is at east counter intuitive to the ways I’ve managed typography in Adobe Illustrator and Indesign for the last 20 years.

The RRSN logo project solidified a viable workflow which spread into creating 3D logos for our major sports partners in the region, and with any luck I can streamline it further to create assets for every high school and college in the conferences we respectively cover.

Adhering to the styleguides and conventions of our clients while creating something entirely new in Tony’s case required that I actually exercise my graphic designer muscles. It required that I reverse engineer the Bethel logo’s typeface for letters I haven’t seen. It needed to unequivocally align his broadcast to his role within the BU athletics department. It had to also visually cohere to the 3D logo assets I’d been pumping out over the last two weeks for our other schools and properties.

I was missing the letters N, A, I, which I had to build from scratch from context clues of the existing images. I also took liberties with the angle of the flare of the T’s crossbar descending strokes by inverting them since, T in NATALI is optically centered and becomes more of a focal point in his logo than in the official logo for Bethel Pilots.

After converting all the elements to geometry blender would appreciate, and bringing over materials I had developed for the Bethel 3D model, iterations on adding his mugshot to the logo were attempted until settling on the finalized version:

I said to former Goshen College Men’s Basketball Center, and now Sportscaster with Regional Radio Sports Network, “Tanner Camp, if a basketball was an egg and something hatched out of it… what… would that be?”

“A basketball,” he replied.

Of course, he was right.

This morning, I woke up thinking about a highlight reel we’ve been using to court sponsors this year I produced. What made it possible was the use of a motion graphic that highlighted each replay from the game, usually deployed during touchdowns but occasionally when something wild might happen. From that I was able to avoid sitting through four hours of video stream and make something that promoted our work in a fashion we hadn’t tried yet but probably should have?

To be sure, I am exactly one person moonlighting as a sports graphics guy.

Stingers solve me having to dig through hours of footage. The basketball “egg” graphic had been originally developed specifically for replays for this basketball season. I apparently lost track of that particular objective while fussing over procedurally generating the basketball skin texture. The objective was not to create a basketball egg that violently is hatched open by what’s inside.

My objective was to somehow unveil the replay video. Maybe I’ll unscrew the ball like a capsule or something? We’ll see.

Anyways, like the food.com recipe authors who proceeded me a decade ago, this preamble will give way to me stepping through the preparation process for some motion graphics work I’ll create for broadcast.

Step 1. Un-Goofing my source file.

Removing the light flares, the extra models and keeping only what absolutely worked before:

The masks and materials as they appear in Cycles Engine.

For some reason my render engines had wildly different interpretations of my bump maps and texture image masks. I thought the EEVEE engine’s render was preferable for this effort (in my opinion the concept came across stronger at this stage of development, although that might change later on.)

The masks and materials as they appear or “behave” in EEVEE 🤨.

I have some work to do to adjust the material node groups to get them into alignment with what I had originally intended. In the meanwhile, let’s hop over to our “B-Plot”, designing a cool Replay graphic that will go on the ball the way the RRSN logo is presented.

Outline and Overprint views in Adobe Illustrator. (Top: Outline, Bottom: Overprint)

I inherited the RRSN logo, and there are some versions of it hanging around the office that probably predate my first prescription eyeglasses back in 1994. But it’s basically Rockwell Ultra Bold, Impact font running on paths which track around the diameter of a circle cut in halves, sub-divided by a rectangle that frames “Sports”. Together, they’re skewed at a dynamic feeling angle. It’s a strong brand. Stronger now that I feel like we’re rounding the corner on web news properties of the oughts and twenty-teens. It’s a news publication company that ultimately survived the dustbowl of media decades… does it need a re-brand? Who doesn’t. Should it rebrand? I’d argue, no. I think hewing to it’s humble Apple iic / Adobe Frame Maker 2.0 era of inception convey’s it’s longevity and implies a hearty, organizational constitution. “Like classical music it says, this form of media will out live you.”

Cool. So let’s harmonize with it.

Note, I’m doing this in real time as I write this post because I can. This actually isn’t an instant replay.

The original arrangement of “Regional, Radio, Sports Network” places an emphasis on the Radio part by breaking it out of baseline path. My rational for reincorporating it into the circular baseline of the logo’s bowtie (lawnmower blade?) is as follows:

Emphasis and subordination of placing all four part of “Regional”, “Radio”, “Sports”, and “Network” keep them conceptually entangled.
The addition of Sports to the bottom line creates the opportunity for symmetry at the top of the logo.
This symmetry and subordination to the concept of Replay emphasizes a replay’s importance within the broadcast while imply it’s ephemerality.

A further thought on point number 1. Removing Sports from the mix and keeping the elements “Regional”, “Radio”, and “Network” when paired with the chunky “REPLAY”, may imply a secondary station or youtube property we run, it’s too close to the original meaning of the brand’s logo, demarcating a disembodied organizational personhood. I believe the compromise with the text, in the B1 Series of mockups, breaking the established form, emphasizes the replay’s function within the brand’s network broadcast.

Back to our A-Plot

I’m using a compound texture. One where the bumps on the skin (rind?) of the ball and their coloration is procedural. My logos are obviously UV mapped from illustrator .png files with alpha channels. Understanding what’s going on in a node system, or at least, explaining it to someone else works better starting from the end of the chain and working your way to the beginning. Finally a vector bump map that matches the splotchy dots on the skin of the ball create the illusion of the surface having a form of exclusion. You know, for finger grip.

The bump map is inferred from data from other materials adding color values together and telling bender they are in fact “vectors”. The materials themselves are three materials that need composing or masking together.

The orange of the ball, the black of the seems and logo surface, and the gold of the imprint. All three of these materials are controlled by blender’s Principled BSDF (Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function).

A couple of other issues rather than masking have become clear as we zoom in. Bumps in Cycles are usually more dramatic, and need to be toned down. Then there’s the mask itself.

Let’s solve for the EEVEE render discrepancy first.

PNG alpha channels are understood by blender to be just another range of color number 0-255. Odds are I produced a black-and-white png that didn’t have a transparency layer (because creating compound paths from deformed typography can have some unpredictable results for adobe illustrator would be why I was reluctant to keep my alpha channels consistent). And if I invert the color being used in the node system, it may… solve itself.

We can add a color input to the node group that inverts the color of the alpha and see if it makes a difference.