Elite Dangerous originally featured three main playstyles, and players were encouraged to earn progressively higher ranks by completing related activities.

We gave them a little visual/audio reward via an in-game fanfare. Each rank has a progressively 'punchier' variant of the core animation. Ultimately ending with the animations you see here.

Listening to the audio on these videos comes highly recommended

Combat

I had the great pleasure of working closely with Frontier's Head of Audio, Jim Croft. He was a great help during the concept phase, and was responsible for the audio design.

Timings that work visually can often feel wrong when audio enters the mix. For example, the combat animation originally had more 'thunks' in a tight rhythm. It looked great! But when audio was added, the whole thing began looking cluttered and offbeat.

I realised that my brain had begun favouring the audio to provide the primary 'rhythm' of the animation. With Jim's guidance, I was able to tweak the visual tempo, adding more room between 'beats'. Suddenly the whole thing clicked.

This was one of those real 'aha' moments for me. To this day, I close my eyes and lay down keyframes based on what sounds right in my head.

If you're motion design is going to have audio, you simply can't think of audio as something that will come later. The two must be developed in tandem to get great results.

Trade

The fanfares were a real technical challenge for a number of reasons. Firstly, at the time we had no support for rendering video within our UI system, so these had to be authored and rendered within a realtime system (Flash's timeline, and Scaleform's renderer).

Secondly, each playstyle had 9 ranks. Meaning we needed 27 variants in total. To get these done within a reasonable timeframe meant approaching these somewhat procedurally. For example, in the trade animation below, the pulses arcing between points in the constellation are automatically triggered at the appropriate time via a parent/child relationship. It's only the position of the points that are hand-placed.

Exploration

The volumetric 'glow explosion' you see at the end of all these animations was particularly tricky to get right.

I employed something like a 'sprite sheet' you've probably seen used in other games for things like smoke. I rendered a volumetric light shining through the logo in Maya. The light animated down so the rays wash upward. I picked three keyframes from this render, and quickly blended between them on a single billboard. Quick and dirty, but I think it works.

Triple Elite

Here's a little Brucie Bonus for you. This one never got past the concept phase, and ended up getting sacrificed to the alter of 'not enough time'. The idea being that players who reached the top of all three ranks would get an additional reward.