If your client is asking for a 3D extruded logo animation in his video and all he has for company graphics is his business card you better dig deep into your toolbox. And you better find a copy of Boris RED 4 in it because that is what you’ll need to get this tough job done.

Going through my pile of business cards I was looking for something that may be more challenging for Boris Vector Trace tool and I came up with this one:

I scanned this card with my AGFA Snapscan 1212 home scanner at 150 dpi in color mode knowing that I will only be interested in the company logo in the top left part of the card. The logo was most likely produced in Illustrator. It has a typical Boolean intersection of the E and S splines. In addition, the transparent fill of S may look interesting with a video background behind it.

I first imported this image in Boris RED (running as a plugin or a standalone, does not matter). I got it showing in the Preview window at full size. Now it is ready for vector tracing.

To start, deselect the image track in the timeline and pick the Pencil tool from the tool palette as shown on the screen shot above. Normally, this Pencil tool is used for freehand drawing line art but in RED it has special powers. It can sense the underlying raster image and magically trace it to produce the line art. Let’s try this now. To “turn the magic on” you have to press Option Shift keys on Mac or Control Shift keys on Windows and simply drag the pencil across the area of the image that you’d like to trace. I started at the top left of letter B and ended at the bottom right of S. The tool will draw the usual box rectangle to help you include the desired part of the image. As soon as you let your mouse go the spline track appears in the timeline window and the red vector outline snaps to the edges of the logo in preview window.

It is a good start but you can see an obvious problem at the top of the letter B where our spline is messed up. Fortunately RED 4 includes a full set of spline manipulation tools as you would expect in the vector graphics package to fix up any mishap. To proceed we need to switch on the Pen tool in the Tool Window.

Now the red spline outline is showing all the control points generated by the Vector Trace feature. As you can see at the top of letter B there are simply too many control ponts and I can easily fix it by deleting some unnecessary points (select control point with a mouse click and hit the Delete/Backspace key on your keyboard). The rest of the spline looks pretty good and I’m ready to extrude it as a real 3D object. Let’s turn our attention to the timeline window that will now see some action. Since I no longer need the underlying business card I can simply turn it off with the eyeball icon (or delete it if you think your tracing work is done). On your Spline Track click on the shape icon and choose 3D Extrusion from the pop up box.

Watch your 2D Spline transform into 3D complete with lighting and shadows. To further enhance the 3D look I rotated the object about 30 degrees (in the control window).

I chose a very simple 3D style for this extrusion employing straight edges and a flat shading material although the program allows you to achieve all kinds of looks. I thought that straight edges would work the best on letter S which has a stroke and a transparent fill while making a Boolean intersection with letter E (accurately preserved during the extrusion process!). This style was saved in my Style palette so applying it was just a simple matter of double clicking on the style thumbnail in the style palette under the Extrusion tab.

To understand how this style was made we need to examine the Extrusion Tab in the Control window (while the extrusion shape track is selected in the timeline). The Extrusion slider controls the depth of the object while the Bevel Amount at 0 will ensure the sharp edge.

The material in this style was selected in the Material tab with the Easy Material tool. I thought that Aluminum would be a good choice but other metallic surface material simulations are available including Copper, Iron, etc.

Now is the time to try the new logo over a video background. If you use RED as a plug in to Avid or Final Cut or many other supported editors the video would most likely come from your host timeline as V1. Since I’m making this project in a standalone application I simply import the background straight into my RED timeline and add a lower third sub title with my customer business name. (I opted for a different choice of font than the one used by the Copy Cops where the card was most likely typeset, but I do not need to mention this to my electrician customer…).

Now that I’m looking at near finished product I notice a slight imperfection on the bottom of the letter S which was not obvious to me before. I can fix it even though the object is already extruded because I still have access to the original splines. In Timeline window I drill down to the Spline Object 1 track.

With that track selected I switch the Pen tool on again, and this time zoom in the Composite window to 200% (with the mouse wheel over the window).

To learn more about Vector Trace and other great features of RED 4 check out the tutorials on the www.borisfx.com. A special vector trace video tutorial covering additional features and workflows can be found here:

www.borisfx.com/html/products/red4/VTrace_tutorial/VectTrace.html