DNA Shape But Made Up Of Letters

[Kevin Camp]

try creating 2 lines of text in a comp and angle them diagonally. then bring that comp into a new comp and add cc cylinder to the nested comp. and see if that gets you close to what you need.

it will probably take more futzing around with in the precomp, but i think you may be able to get something that is workable…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Pat Bray]

Many thanks for the advice, that might just work. I’ll need to figure out how to add the connecting branches between the two letter strands and keep them in sync with them, will move to 3D if I have no luck…

P

[Matthew Woods]

You could also try to using text animators with “per character 3d” enabled. I just made a pretty good single helix by adding one text animator to my string that offset the characters’ anchor points along the z axis. Then added another text animator with shape set to “ramp up” that adjusted the position along the y, and rotation around the y.

-Matt

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[Matthew Woods]

You could make the connecting lines in a similar fashion using underscores or dashes scaled horizontally and twisting around the z axis as they rise. Per Character text animators aren’t very intuitive, but you can do some nifty stuff with them.

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Try my game Constellation at:
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[Kevin Camp]

to add the connectors, you’d need to split the cylinder (duplicate it and set one to render front/outside, the other to render back/inside) then sandwich the connectors in between… it could get pretty tricky.

mathew’s suggestion of using per-character 3d would have the advantage of being entirely in ae’s 3d space (not a mix of plugin 3d and ae 3d), making it easier to add the connectors and then parenting everything to a null, or putting them all into a nested comp with collapse transformations enabled.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Take a look at Eran Stern’s COW Tutorial on creating a a very similar effect. Your solution is in there –
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/stern_eran/Tornado_Text1/video-tutorial

HTH
RoRK

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[Matthew Keane]

Hi,

I don’t know if you have access to any 3rd party plugins, but I recently made needed to make a DNA animation and used Trapcode Form, which will give you a 3D element that you can fly a camera around or through. There are a few tutorials out there if you search around a bit. You could use a custom particle to show a random letter and, by using gradient maps, you can control their size, position and opacity. In the animation I made, the client wanted to see the connections form between the 2 spirals – not sure if that has any scientific basis, but it looks good!

[Pat Bray]

Thanks folks for the advice, I’m using the Per-character 3D tool and it’s working well, however the interconnecting ‘bars’ are causing a problem. I wondered, using the vertical text tool, I’ve created some underlines which acts as the interconnecting bars, but they need to be offset by so many degrees each, so they twist round correctly (hope this makes sense!). Is there some way of doing this or perhaps using an expression?