Create a 3D animated Logo

Fancy a 3D logo for your YouTube videos? James Morris starts you off with a simple 3D text animation.

We're going to create a ten-second animation, which will be 250 frames at the usual European TV frame rate of 25 frames per second. The animation controls can be found near the end of the long strip of icons, and look like regular VCR controls.

Right click on the red Play arrow, and select the Scene radio button next to Draw, and PAL for Base Rate. Our logo is going to tumble in, hold for four seconds, then tumble out. We want the hold position to occur in the centre of the screen, where we created the text, so our first job is to set up this middle section.

To the far right of the icon strip is a white box, which shows the Current Frame Number. Type in 75 (three seconds into the animation), hit Enter and click on the red circle to record a keyframe. Next, type 175 (seven seconds into the animation), hit Enter and record another keyframe. This creates the four static seconds in the middle.

After that, type 0 into the Current Frame Number, and hit Enter to go to the beginning of the animation. We're going to start the animation from the top left, then spin the logo and zoom in. The sixth icon from the left provides the tools for this, and you need to select Object Move to shift over the text. After that, left click on the icon, hold down the mouse button and choose Rotate Object. Spin the text around a few times, then select the Scale Object tool and make the text so small that it virtually disappears. Finally, type 250 into the Current Frame Number, hit Enter and repeat the scaling and zooming, but moving the text to the right.

Rendering your animation

You'll then have a 250-frame animation, and you can preview it by pressing Play on the VCR-style controls. The final step is to create your final output. Next to the icon on the top right that we used to change between wireframe and D3D preview modes is an icon that looks like a brown box in front of a grid. Click on this with your left mouse button and hold until the strip of alternatives appears.

After that, choose Render Scene to File. Since 3D is independent of the resolution, you can choose any size, although trueSpace includes a variety of presets, such as 720 x 576 for PAL TV quality. You can output to a sequence of bitmaps or JPG frames, an FLC animation or, most usefully, an AVI. Choose a format, make sure that All Frames is selected, and add Motion Blur and Depth of Field effects if you like. If you chose AVI, you'll be greeted by a dialog box in which you can select your compression codec.

You can then sit back and watch your animation render. Depending on the speed of your PC, the render resolution and any processing effects applied, this could take a few minutes. This is only the beginning too. Despite its antiquity, trueSpace 3.2 has a comprehensive array of complex tools, plus Inverse Kinematics for animating limbed creatures and its own rudimentary physics simulation system. The trueSpace download includes a series of tutorials, so you can try some of these as well.

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