Letters orbiting in position? Inheritance problems, Xpresso maybe?

[Brian Jones]

do you mean this kind of movement? 1521_letterorbit.c4d.zip (that’s an R12 file)

[Corrado Carlevaro]

Thank you for your reply, but I can’t open the file (r 12) till Friday. The letters should come in final position after describing an arc of 180° each, very simple. Problem is that as far as I understand you can’t treat letters (MoGraph Text) with Effectors as normal clones, as letters have specific relative positions (kerning?) and if put in a Cloner you have to uncheck Fix Clones, with different behaviors. Moreover, with Inheritance Effector you have to bake the circular motion, and I was wondering if there’s a more procedural way with Xpresso, but I don’t know how to implement the iterations and the time offset (the Animation mode of Inheritance Effector).
Anyway, I’ll give a try to your file as soon as i can

Thanks
Corrado Carlevaro

[Brian Jones]

the file uses a Plain effector to rotate the letters (the effector is on the Mograph Text “Letters” tab) 180° in B with the Axis (also in the Letters tab) shifted all the way left so the letters don’t rotate around their dead center. That axis shift is limited to the size of the letter and the arc it made was not very big so I added a second Plain effector, also in the Letters tab, to move the letters so the arc is bigger. Then the first plain effector is moved through the text.
I still don’t know if that’s the rotation direction you meant but that’s one way to do what I think you’re saying regardless of which rotation is used.

[Corrado Carlevaro]

Yes, I’ve been thinking to the Plain Effector but I knew you can shift the letter’s axis only inside the letter’s bounding box, so the arc was very little ( the rotation I meant is around the Z axis, so the arc is frontal and the letters shift on X axis). I still can’t figure out how the second Plain Effector can enlarge the arc instead of just shifting the letters, cause, as I told you, I don’t have C4D at the moment, but, if this is what is supposed to do, then this is what I was looking for.

I’ll try as soon as I can and let you know.
Thank you very much

corrado carlevaro

[Adam Trachtenberg]

It’s possible to do what you’re after, but a little bit involved.

First, the method Brian suggests can work, but only if the center of rotation is no lower than the base of the text. In that case you only need one plane effector, as you can set the letter pivot position in the motext object … but no lower than the text baseline.

Second, can use the inheritance effector method, but it does require keyframes so you have to bake the target object. When I tried that I discovered that the Timeline’s bake function didn’t record rotation keyframes properly when I tried to bake a spline-aligned null directly. For some reason it screwed up the rotation. What I had to do was use Xpresso to tie the aligned null’s global matrix to the global matrix of another null, and then bake the second null. I’ll report it to Maxon.

Even though you’re using baked animation, you can still edit it to some extent without too much trouble by scaling the animated object with the Animation Tool, e.g., if you want to make the arc larger or smaller after the fact.

Here’s an 11.5 file: 1525_orbitingtext.c4d.zip

[Corrado Carlevaro]

The method Brian suggested is working cause the second Plain Effector is actually shifting the pivot, or perhaps shifting the letters respect to the pivot, anyway it works.

Animation Tool is a good tip too. Fortunately I baked the spline-aligned null manually, so I didn’t see the rotation issue.

Speaking about Xpresso (or even Py4D), is there a way to write some script behaving like Animation Mode of Inheritance Effector? Taking objects inside a list and apply them some kind of movement in sequence, with frame gap?
Question is: do you know where I can find some info about that?

Thank you very much

Corrado Carlevaro

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Brian’s method can rotate the letters and shift them vertically, but the vertical shift does not follow a perfect arc. It actually just moves the letters straight up.

It’s possible in Xpresso using the Time node, calculate nodes, and iteration nodes, but I don’t know of any resource describing the whole process. I’ll try to put together a sample file if I can find some time.

[Corrado Carlevaro]

I put the letters axis in the middle bottom of the bounding box, shifted them horizontally, tweaked the falloff and got pretty much the effect I was looking for.
If you are telling me this is not a perfetc arc, good reason to try and make an Xpresso setup to move objects in sequence, from the tips you gave me or waiting for your setup.

I saw a video of Chris Smith talking about Py4D in which the first example is a script to scale objects in sequence with spring effect, very easy to do with MoGraph, but could be a starting point for more complex movements.

One more question, if you can: I want the letters to have a little trail, 2 or 3 copies of the letter itself, kind of motion blur/ghost effect: I tried with a copy of the whole text and shifted it one frame forward but of course one frame is a too big gap to have the copy close enough, just behind the original. Any idea?

Thank you very much

Corrado Carlevaro

[Adam Trachtenberg]

To leave a trail of copies I would duplicate the motext object and inheritance effector. Apply only the copied effector to the copied text and advance the effector’s Start and (optionally) End parameters several frames. Repeat for the number of copies you want.

In the alternative, you could use the same inheritance effector for all of the text objects and assign each copied text object a Delay effector, staggering the strength of the delay effectors.

[Corrado Carlevaro]

Thank you for your help

Corrado Carlevaro