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Animate cast shadow on 3D text?
I have 3D text on a shot and I’ve animated the text to simulate the camera moving past it. I used the Drop Shadow effect to position a cast shadow (which looks good) but when the text moves the shadow’s movement kills the illusion. I’ve tried key framing every parameter in the Drop Shadow effect to no avail. Is there a way to animate the shadow to mimic the “camera move” on the 3D text?
I realize this could probably be accomplished perfectly in After Effects, but I’m hoping there’s an easier way in FCPX.
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8 Replies
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Well, Apple Motion would be my first choice rather than AE… but you know, the text generator in FCPX has its own drop shadow options, have you played with that?
Another way to go would be to duplicate the text and create a flat 2-d version of it to use as a drop shadow, animating it completely separate.
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It’s more of a cast shadow than a drop shadow, but I love the idea of creating 2D text and making it look like a shadow and animating it separately. Thank you!
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Hi Scott,
I’ll add that Boris FX has some text tools that LIVE for animating cast shadows as easily as drop shadows. Graffiti is the text-specific plug-in, but these features exist in pretty much all Boris products.
I was working at Boris FX when Boris (yes, there’s a dude named Boris) was developing these tools 20-ish years ago, and I gotta tell you, it was crazy exciting to watch. There’s been a lot of software come and go over the years, but nobody does cast shadows better than Boris, I say as somebody who started using After Effects and a heap of plugins in 1993. (I in fact used to run a website called Plugin Central, long since unplugged. LOL)
And a bit for your trivia notebook — my predecessor as the Boris FX product manager left the company to work for (then) Discreet (now Autodesk). Apple bought his entire team and turned their as yet unnamed product into Apple Motion.
Anyway, there are free trials of all of Boris’s stuff at borisfx.com, and tutorials out the wazoo at their website (as well as a goodly number here). If you want to animate cast shadows, Boris has what you’re looking for.
Good luck!
Tim
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Here’s a very quick pass at creating a “cast shadow” Title effect for FCP X.
There are countless ways in which this basic principle can be adapted to do pretty much anything you would like it to do. (It can even be made into an Effect so it will work with sources that are not FCP X Titles.)
Note that you need to use the Title Transform controls to animate this not the layer Transform controls.
To install, unzip the archive and place the entire folder in your Movies/Motion Templates/Titles folder. It will be available next time you open FCP X.
Simon Ubsdell
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New version that fixes a plumbing mistake and adds the option to orientate the “plane” on which the shadow is cast.
(Note that this method, unlike most standard shadow methods, isn’t just adding a coloured overlay to the background image, it’s colour correcting it, which gives a much more realistic result.)
Simon Ubsdell
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I can’t thank you enough! This is perfect.
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