Patreon Peeks 31: Mental Map Mountain (Patreon)

Hello! This week, I have some insider info about a subtle effect in the recent video about A Short Hike, which you can watch here: https://youtu.be/PCtQFf6us0c

You can see the effect at around 6:42. I talk about how Mark Sparling's music helped create a mental map with which I could divide up the game's island. I wanted to transition from this visual, an abstract illustration of my mental map:

To showing my appreciation for this game's soundtrack, putting it at the peak of the island's mountain the way I had depicted it near the beginning of the video. To do this, I got a crazy idea for an effect: to turn this illustration into the very mountain I needed.

I couldn't think of an easier way to do this than Blender, but that still didn't make it easy. Since this illustration was in motion, kind of subtly contorting (it is just a mental image, after all) I had to render out a video of it, and then import that video into Blender. Then, I used that video as an animated texture plastered over the following mesh:

So, this height mapping now makes the illustration look like this from the side:

But still looks like the original image if viewed from the top with a small field of view. (The first image posted here is actually the first frame of this animation, so, that's really what it looks like from above in 3D!)

All I had to do to complete the effect was create a smooth camera animation that pans closer to the island, increases its field of view, and orbits slightly so that you can eventually see the mountain peak from the side. It was very challenging to get all of those to feel like one smooth motion, mainly just a lot of trial and error.

In the end though, it fit perfectly into After Effects, creating a neat 3D transition to my next talking point. It was a lot of work for basically 3 seconds of footage, but, I always like to think the video is better off for it!