• Apple Motion

  Motion fxplug creating text objects

  Posted by Hayden Young on January 19, 2009 at 1:13 am

  how can i use fxplug to create a plugin that will create text objects?

  right now i found an example that is a generator that renders text but doesn’t create a text object

  can i make it create a text object?
  i have literally thousands of words i want to appear in a scene and surely we can all agree that doing it manually is a tedious process that should be easily automated…

  or if anyone knows of a plugin that creates text objects (and has the source code) then that to would also be cool 🙂

  Hayden Young replied 17 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Peter Wiggins

  January 19, 2009 at 1:48 pm

  What are you attempting to do? A bit more info might help

  Peter
• 

  Hayden Young

  January 19, 2009 at 8:04 pm

  Hi Peter,
  thanks for your reply

  ok, i’ll try give more detail

  say i have 1000 words, and i want them to exist for a certain amount of frames.
  during the time they exist they will animate (keyframe animation is sufficient).
  at a certain frame the word’s outline will change and then a behavior will activate on that word, and the character will individually vanish in a fancy way

  what i want to do with FX plug is read in a text file that contains the words, their life span, and where/when they will animate. This part is easy, it’s just basic Objective C stuff

  specific to motion, i want the FX Plug to create a text object for each word that it reads with certain properties.
  i want the user to be able to control the colour of the outline of the words. The problem is, is that each word will have a different style attached to them and as far as i can tell, you can select all text objects and mass modify their outline colour (that is, modify all the outline colours at once)
  so i want to create the UI (easy) that will mass modify all the text object’s outline colour
  I also want to mass apply a behavior that will trigger at the unique frame that the word should “die”

  so, in summary
  i need the FX plug to:
  – read in a text file (easy, i can do that already)
  – create a text object that exists for a certain length of time, and animates transformation values
  – keyframe the outline (information provided by the text file)
  – change the colour of the outline of ALL words at once
  – apply a behavior that will trigger at a certain unique frame (specified by the text file for a particular word)

  is this possible in motion?

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