How the gold Basedash logo works in Unicorn Studio

The gold Basedash logo shows up when your trial ends (0:29), and I made it in Unicorn Studio. This was the second time I recorded the video. Before the first take I tried to rebuild it from scratch and couldn't, and I have no idea how I did it the first time (0:09). It took a long time, too, because I made it for dark mode first and had to redo the whole thing for light mode (0:58).

So this is me going through the layers instead. There's a vignette to soften the edges, because when I put these on a page I don't want them to look like they're in a box (1:11). God rays give it a diffused light, like light coming through fog in a video game, and I gave mine a color (1:37). Then the dither, which is my jam, at 8×8 like all of ours (2:02). The light that follows your cursor is wisps, scaled way up and barely moving (2:24).

The gradient map is the part I couldn't recreate (3:36). The shape came in a pale yellow, and the map gives it the lowlights, highlights and reflections that make it look like gold. Water caustics behind it make the gold look like it's shimmering, a little bit alive (5:19). And the shape itself is just an SVG: if it's flattened into a single shape, Unicorn turns it into 3D, so you don't need a 3D asset at all (5:59). I'd done the same thing with the OpenAI logo before (6:25). I shared the file at the end (7:07), and the dithered loading animations came a week later.

When I posted it on X I wrote:

I don’t know how I made that gold logo in unicorn studio. Tried to recreate it--failed. So I made a video showing how it works.