In a Mirror, darkly

"Corporate porn", that is in-your-face logo animations, spinning globes and expanding networks, is perhaps one of the biggest driving forces behind a specific kind of motion graphics and so it inevitably happens that at some point everyone will have the need for some reflection maps for that gold or chrome type stuff. Now finding good maps is not at all easy and neither is creating them, especially when they are supposed to have motion themselves. To make that a bit easier (and because some friend asked for it) I created a little project that may help. Though, to tell you the truth, it was a major exercise in frustration as well. It’s funny that once you need a specific After Effects effect you just never can seem to find it and doing this project once more made me realize how crappy the program’s filtering is and just the same how dysfunctional in particular the distortion effects are because of it (among other things). It’s really getting weird to see that most 3D programs offer better and more image filtering methods than an application that is supposed to do this as its main body of work and one can only hope that we see some movement there soon…