PGA 3D Toolkit

Client

PGA

Role
Technical Artist
Motion Designer

As a technical artist in collaboration with STATE Design, I developed an After Effects toolkit tailored for PGA, to allow them to effortlessly modify text and logos on six 3D animations featuring the PGA Tour NFT Sports Packs. Notably, it gives PGA the freedom to customize the graphics for future projects autonomously, eliminating the need for extended rendering times in Cinema4D.

Workflow

I oversaw and planned the workflow for producing the toolkit, facing a particular challenge: maintaining consistent lighting effects on various materials and decals of the packs. Instead of matching the lighting through composting, we tackled this by utilizing two sets of the 3D animations — one “plain” and the other “colored” versions of the pack. I then use alpha mattes based on the the unwrapped UV map of the box packaging, aligned with the pack’s respective plane using camera data exported from C4D. Additionally, I used an extra pass of the pack with an RGB matte as alpha mattes to crop the custom graphics within each plane.

The two videos below demonstrate the concept of this workflow.

Toolkit Usage

To make the toolkit obvious and easy to use, there are only two properties to change: a slider control that allow users to to switch between the six animations using a slider control and media replacement of the decal with an Illustrator template file.