UCLA ESPORTS STAFF REVEAL
A motion project for UCLA Esports. The social media team had the idea of capitalizing on the huge resurgence of Pokemon card packs following the release of Pocket TCG. I worked to bring their vision to life.
ROLE
Graphic Design Director
CATEGORY
Work / Community / Personal
TOOLS
After Effects
Blender
TEAM
Marketing Director Ivan T.
Graphic Design Directors Katherine W., Ella Chen
Social Media Intern Thuyen T.
📚 JUMP TO
Click these section bookmarks or scroll to view my process creating this pack opening from scratch!
final post
🧊 3D MODELLING
I started by repurposing a package model sourced from Sketchfab, which I then reshaped and cleaned up to match the dimensions and details of an actual Pokémon booster pack using reference images. This involved reworking the topology and applying custom textures to replicate the iconic foil packaging.
💡 LIGHTING
After making the Pokemon pack in Blender, I imported the 3D model into After Effects, making copies to form a circle and keyframing each pack to make them look like they were floating.
However, I quickly ran into the challenge of replicating Blender’s realistic lighting inside AE’s limited 3D environment. Because the original materials didn’t translate, I had to add and tweak 3 spotlights, an enviroment light, and a masked adjustment layer on the frontmost pack to maintain dimension, while also going back and forth between Blender to edit the foil material and re-export.
default LIGHTING
ENVIRO LIGHTS + SPOTLIGHTS
ALL BEFORE + masked ADJUSTMENT LAYER
📽️ TEAR ANIMATION
The hardest part of this project that I wasn't even sure I could accomplish was the satisfying opening animation; I studied the original pack opening a lot, even keeping the original sequence I found in this official gameplay trailer on YouTube↗ as a layer beneath my comp reference constantly. I realized I had to add 3 things:
A camera zoom where the packs in the background fade and the front pack comes closer.
A "tracing" animation, the interaction effect when players slide their finger across the pack.
A flash moment to mask a subtle background change.
A tear animation where the top of the pack slices off and flies away.
trace animation
The camera zoom was simple to replicate using a 3D camera. For the tracing animation, I used Trim Paths on two Pen tool strokes, then layered VR Chromatic Aberrations and Fast Box Blur for a glowing effect. I also added Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation to the background for the flash moment.
For the packet tear, I cut out the top and bottom sections from a render screencap in Photoshop. This let me fake the animation without touching my model or rotoscoping an animation from Blender. I keyframed the top piece flying off and used CC Bend It, adjusting properties until it looked close to the official animation.
split components
without CC Bend it
with CC Bend it
🖱️ UI ANIMATIONS
This section was more tedious than expected. Originally, I thought I could screen-record online gameplay footage, but any I found were low-res and didn't have the clips I needed.
Luckily, I ended up stumbling across this Google Drive of scraped Pokemon TCG Pocket assets↗ so I could make the animations from scratch. The bad part was the assets were barely organized and were cryptically named, so I had to dig around for a couple hours finding the components I needed.
I started by animating the "You can open a booster pack" notification. Using Photoshop, I split the asset into two parts: the pack icon and the base. After painting over the gap, I keyframed the icon sliding in and added a white layer to simulate a moving highlight.
"You can open a booster pack" notification
I found the star that pops up under each car in the Drive and overlayed a stock footage of sparkles, as the original sparkles seemed to be created directly in Unity and weren't in the assets folders. The final component was sound; each sound effect was listed separately in the Google Drive, so I cobbled them back together to replicate the soundscape of Pokemon TCG Pocket.
