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Cause text to move around the screen in an oval shape
Hi all, long time lurker but haven’t been able to find exactly what I’m looking for this time round.
I’m creating a very basic “profile” video, and would like between 2 to 5 small pieces of text to move around a picture. I’ve tried tying the text boxes to a null object located in the centre of the video and then rotating the null, but this causes the text to go around in a perfect circle, whereas I need it to go around in an oval like this:
I’ve tried ‘drawing’ the position manually using keyframes but the speed and path varies a little too much.
I’d also like to be able to easily adjust the speed to see what looks best.Any ideas?
In case anyone was wondering, I found a way to keep the text upright by using Dan Ebberts’ simple but awesome expression in thread 227/19293.
Thanks.
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3 Replies
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It’s called Path Text (or Text on a Path):
https://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/animating-text-along-a-path-in-after-effects-ae-basix–ae-8636
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Thanks for the link Joe, however I want the text to stay in a straight line, whereas that effect causes the letters to animate around the object. Any ideas how this can be achieved?
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There are a couple of different ways to do something like this.
Draw a mask the shape you want. Paste it to a text layer’s position property. This will give you two regular keyframes and all the rest will be roving keyframes. This means that you simply move the end keyframes and the rest of them will adjust automatically.
Do the parent it to a null thing to get your perfect circle, but make all of those layers 3d, then change the rotation on x. This will result in an oval shape when viewed with a camera with a narrow focal length (that is, a camera that’s far away and zoomed way in. This will compress the depth, so it doesn’t look like it’s moving away from the camera, but is merely moving in an oval.
I’m sure there are some other ways. You might be able to do it with some clever nesting hierarchy tricks in C4D, for example.
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