Behind the Scenes of My 3D Stained Glass Animation Using Adobe Firefly After Effects and Cinema 4D

This past Friday, I had some free time after work, so I decided to create a quick animation to keep me busy. I often look through my usual art and design blogs for inspiration and ideas, and this project was no different. On https://www.thisiscolossal.com/ I came across a post featuring stained glass art by Raúl de Nieves. The designs are awesome, and looking at the stills, my mind started up its engines and took off.

I had the American Spectator documentary to work on most of Saturday and some on Sunday, so I couldn't realistically design the glass from scratch. So I went to Shutterstock and sourced a handful of stained glass vectors to animate. I also have an Envato account I use sometimes (really because it's pretty cheap), but Shutterstock had a much better selection of designs for this particular project. Once downloaded, I generated JPGs from the vectors and threw them into Adobe Firefly's AI video model to generate an animation to be used as a texture in 3D.

Generating animations using Aodbe's AI Firefly

The Firefly AI step took some time because I had to test out the right prompt and do multiple generations until I had the right animation. It would often come out too fast or change the composition completely. But it pulled through and resulted in animations I am happy with.

Now comes the fun part - The Composition.

In After Effects, I first designed a layout for the glass framing. I didn't want just square and rectangular frames. That would be boring. I added circles, diamonds, and dividers. I looked at the videos layed underneath and thought "Lets kaleidoscope this thing".

I initially wanted to use an ultra-wide framing, but ended up only rendering a standard 16x9 image sequence; otherwise, the render times on this thing would take too long to work with with my current schedule.

Soooo.... I opened Cinema 4d, built the frame and glass, and pasted on the texture. I a rotating light rig behind it to get the light diffusion right, rendered, and VOILA, the final loop.

I'm happy with how it turned out. I now know I can build something like this, and so, I can try a version that requires a little more work in the future. Maybe next weekend I can render out the wider version since I think that's the best version of this design.

Thanks for catching up with me. I'm almost done with the documentary project I've mentioned in earlier posts. I also have been working on the animation for "The Most Dangerous Game", AND I have been working on another animated film which I won't officially share until I have enought content to post.