Tutorial for Animating a Magic 8-Ball in After Effects

A Magic 8 Ball contains a cylinder with a regular icosahedron (a sphere created from 20 triangles) submerged in a blue liquid. The cylinder has a flat top, and the dark blue liquid obscures the other sides as one of the twenty messages floats to the top.

You could easily create the icosahedron using Blender or even the included C4D lite. Then, you could set up some rotation and position animations that made the message triangles appear to float into view by using a Circle with an animated gradient to reveal the message. That would be accurate, but because the Magic 9 Ball only shows one triangle and message at a time, you should be able to get away with just one triangle and an editable text layer.

Something like this: Create a small square comp with a triangle-shaped layer, add the text, and add some bevel and drop shadow using layer styles. You could then add a spherical shape layer lens with a gradient, then parent the triangle and text layer to a 3D null offset in Z. Animating the rotation and position of the 3D null would give you the appearance of the text layer coming into view.

Nest that 3D comp in your main comp with a sphere effect applied to a nested pair of layers with a white circle, an 8, and a Black background, and you've got your 8 Ball. Then, it's just a simple matter of layering and matching the rotation values with simple expressions for position and rotation, and you will have a pretty good simulation of a magic 8 Ball.

I don't have time to put together a sample comp right now, but the project should take no longer than 30 minutes to complete. 

You could even turn it into a MOGRT that you could use in Premiere Pro and change the outcome or text with a click or two.