Loading Stats

An animated illustration for Ride Stats— a macOS app for viewing and analysing cycling stats.

This one was the most difficult to make, both conceptually and technically.

Conceptually: I had to come up with some kind of loading animation as a feature asset in the app, while keeping to the 3D style I had set up in the rest of the illustrations. So, I decided to just create the illustration and then animate it within Blender, and export it out as a video.

Technically: the challenge was figuring out the right export settings such that the video had a transparent background (so it can work over a light/dark window background), with a small file size— while still appearing as crisp as the other static 3D renders. The result: a 740kb video file, at 1024x1024px resolution, with a transparent background, and running at 60fps.

Mad kudos to one Matt Kelsh who helped me wrangle the right FFmpeg settings to get that exported result.