How would you animate brackets and text like this?

[Peter Nestler]

I would suggest building the brackets in Illustrator and choose to continually rasterize the image, that way you won’t have any degradation in their look if they scale up. 3d space all the elements (except the car footage) and parent the text to the brackets so they move together.

Use the motion tracker to match the movement of the car. Copy the keyframes onto the position of the end point of the line (or use an expression). Unfortunately there’s no way to track the motion in 3d inside of AfterEffects so you’ll have to fake it. One way I’ve found that works well is to have a 2d object that scales up and down matching one object in the scene (in the case of the smart key text just put an object over the door handle). Once you’ve got that keyframed properly just use an expression that has your z-position match the scaling of the object. That way it will give the impression that it is moving forward and backward in sync with the motion of the car.

[Darby Edelen]

This should be easier than you think if the car is rotating at a constant speed (as objects on turntables usually do). I would recommend creating a 3D Null object and animating it’s Y rotation to match the car’s as closely as possible. Then I would create more Nulls in 3D space at the locations you want the line to ‘attach’ the car and yet more 3D Nulls where you want the line to meet the bracket =) Parent all of these Nulls to your original Null

Then I would use the following expression to create a beam from the ‘startNull’ to the ‘endNull’ for each line:

For the origin of the beam:

s = thisComp.layer('startNull').toComp(thisComp.layer('startNull').anchorPoint);


For the end of the beam:

e = thisComp.layer('endNull').toComp(thisComp.layer('endNull').anchorPoint);


Then I would import bracket graphics (with or without text) from Illustrator and parent each those to their respective Nulls and use Dan Ebberts's expression for Auto-Orienting to Y only on these layers:

https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/auto-orient-y-only.html

Getting your original Null to rotate with the car at the correct speed and making sure that the beams and the brackets meet are going to be your biggest challenges with this technique, but the results should be pretty awesome.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Ryan Hakes]

Thanks Peter and Darby. I think your info has really put me on the right track. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks again

Ryan