Help Creating a HUD

H

higherperspectives

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Is their a plug-in or tutorial that could point me in the right direction of how to create an animated HUD that displays random numbers and flashing lines of letters and tech information on the screen? I need to create this overlay effect for a commercial I'm working on.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.
 
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kai is the unchallenged master or mograph in these here parts, and will probably chime in as soon as he can. But I dabble in Photoshop and AE, and here's a few things I would suggest:

Create as many elements as you can in Photoshop. You can animate lines expanding with masks, and the position and movement of you elements as well. You can use masks to reveal portions of your specific display (like RPMs or speed) which would give the illusion of them growing. You could use things like the angle gradient with a bright line to create radar. Random numbers could probably be generated with expressions. If you are looking for a glowing look, create all your elements in photoshop without a glow, and use a copy of that element on top of the original with a blur and a tint for color. Same basic technique as lightsabers, though less complicated. create your elements on a black background and use either screen or add blending modes to composite them in.

I own a copy of Ilusion which may have some presets of the kind you are looking for. I'll look through it.

If you had a rough sketch of what you are looking for, or a more detailed description (with exactly what you are wanting to have, and where), it would be easier to know how to approach it.
 
I honestly wouldn't create ANYTHING in Photoshop, but it just depends on what tools you can work faster in.

If you are at all familiar with expressions you could drive a lot of variables for realism: for instance use the Y position of an indicator arrow layer to define the value of a block of text. This would give you a nice little altimeter quickly.

For random numbers you don't even need expressions, you just need the handy Text->Numbers effect. You can do quite a bit with it.

The key is to be detailed and thorough if you want it to be believable. I've seen a lot of very fake looking HUDs that are just a few circles and moving lines and randomly shifting text with no rhyme or reason. Remember that a HUD is projected onto glass and so from different angles will reflect and refract. Build individual components in nested compositions and then you can manipulate them much easier.
 
i just posted samples of mine in this post.

You'll see in the gallery section of my site that I made all the assets in photoshop after sketching the ideas out on paper. AE animated the whole thing. I tried to give a purpose to each little data element in my fake O/S.

the exact realism will depend on how long the HUD is shown for and what plot purpose it serves, but this you prolly already know.

there's also another HUD i made in another section of my site here. hehehe, i had to make a lot of them for this sci-fi film!!
 
I'm going have to mirror Matt's suggestion, all very valid and good advice. The main thing is planning. You don't want to just start popping things on all over the screen, you need to design the layout and "function" of the HUD before you animate it, in photoshop.

Check out the work of Mark Coleran, his niche is doing this exact thing, (fake HUD's and screen graphics for CSI, etc): http://www.coleran.com/

You should be able to get some good ideas there.
 
wow, how awesome is Coloeran's work?! amazing stuff. do any of you remember the UIs from Terminator 3 in the skynet labs? Those were really hot too. wonder if C did those too....inspirational stuff. real sweeet
 
kai said:
...
Check out the work of Mark Coleran, his niche is doing this exact thing, (fake HUD's and screen graphics for CSI, etc): http://www.coleran.com/

You should be able to get some good ideas there.
Click to expand...

WOW...that demo reel has got some great stuff in it. Gotta love QT's ability to go frame-by-frame...
 
graymachine said:
If this helps, I posted this at the AE Freemart a while back:

http://www.aefreemart.com/2006/06/animating-radar-screen.html
Click to expand...


That's pretty damn cool. project said it was missing one of the elements though, the bogey file, even though it is in the project. Strange, since the radar elements works.

How did you create the "radar elements" file? AE is recognizing it as vecotored art, but curiously, the file does not have an icon like one would expect to see.
 
That is weird.. it seems to be seen as a PDF. Anyway, I drew it in Illustrator using a lot of dashed lines on circles.

Also, the expression seems to be erroring as the layer is all lower case, and it is looking for uppercase, which is also kinda weird.
 
graymachine said:
That is weird.. it seems to be seen as a PDF. Anyway, I drew it in Illustrator using a lot of dashed lines on circles.

Also, the expression seems to be erroring as the layer is all lower case, and it is looking for uppercase, which is also kinda weird.
Click to expand...


What should the files be? .eps?

I'de like to see the animation, would fixing the expression be as simple as making everything uppercase?
 
The file should an illustrator: .ai


And make it uppercase, that should fix it. I'll try to post an updated version of it today, too.
 
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