How do I do a "twist"?

[Lumpy]

So, I had a guy contact me about re-creating his logo, and having it "twist" in the middle. How can I achieve this? Is there a shortcut?

[Lumpy]

I figured it out; not necessarily a shortcut, but far easier than my other idea, which involved way too many sacrifices to be legal. He only wanted the twist to take 1 second, so I loaded the logo into photoshop, and did 24 "twist" effects, each one 1 degree less than the other, so that when they were put in a switch layer, and placed over 24 frames, it'd look like smooth. It was like a digital frame-by-frame.

[Greenlaw]

I was wondering how you would tackle that. Thanks for posting your solution.

I couldn't think of how to do this easily in ASP because its deformations really only work on a 2D plane. Depending on the artwork, you could move points to simulate the twist but that would take a lot of work to make it look smooth and correct. The only easy method I could think of was to do it in a 3D animation program--that is, texture map the logo onto a subdivided plane and then physically twist the plane with bones or some other 3D deformer. But I didn't think that was what you wanted to hear.

Doing it in Photoshop the way you did sounds like another good alternative.

G.