Bending Text around a corner

[Guy]

you need to warp, or bend a layer in 3D space.
CC Cylinder comes with After Effects and will bend it into a cylindrical shape, but you are limited to a cylinder.
A 3rd party plugin, Forge Freeform, will allow you to warp a layer in 3D space.

[Bobby Walker ii]

Try this oldie but goodie post from Mr. Rick Gerard…

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=651159&archive=T

hth

bobby walker ii
broadcast video COW

G5 2.5GHZ DP,2.5 RAM, AJA IO LA, Medea G-Raid,FCP HD

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

You’ll first need to use either Offset or Motion Tile to animate your text in a scrolling, ticker-tape manner. Once, you’ve got that, turn the layer into a 3D layer and adjust Orientation (Y-axis) to your liking. Duplicate the layer. Adjust the Anchor point of the duplicate so that it is vertically centered either at the left-most (or right-most – depends on your setup) side of the layer. Then adjust Orientation (Y-axis) for this layer so that it forms a right-angle with the original layer.

Thereafter, you only need to stagger the start point of one of the layer’s – IOW, both layers shouldn’t start at the same point in time – this trick ensures that the animated text looks like it is moving across both layers in ONE move. Once you’ve got the stagger done correctly, the text should animate around the corner, across both layers, perfectly.

Hope all this makes sense. Good Luck.

Roland Kahlenberg
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files.

[Ken Latman]

Thanks so much for the info. Rick’s little file helps me so much. It breaks it down better then than what I was trying to do. Sometimes simpiler is better.
I only wish I had searched cow more throughly. Maybe there could be a wikipedia type section for cow for tutorials or techniques. Just an idea.

[Mark Von wahlde]

This post was very helpful, but I needed to precompose each layer to make it work.