making text emanate from certain point

[Andy Neil]

I re-read your post several times, and I can’t get over the feeling that there are just words missing. Words that might help me to understand what you’re trying to do.

For example, I have no idea what this means:

“approx center canvas, moving, sniffing dog nose”

I get that you’re trying to move your text and have it settle somewhere. What I’m not sure is exactly what kind of move you’re trying to achieve. Are the letters flying in independently or together? Is it scaling up from nothing? Try to describe it again and I’ll see if I can help you.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Ann Danylkiw]

the concept detail is really irrelevant. There aren’t words missing. I’m sorry I’m new at this. What I did was take some cartoon smoke and move it around the screen using a bezier and recording it. I’d like for text to come out of the smoke as it moves, i.e. looks like the text emanates from the smoke as it moves around the screen and settle into a stationary line of text. Is this possible? Or am I dreaming?

Thanks, Ann

[Gareth Randall]

I’m with Andy here, you haven’t really explained what you want very well, but I’ll take a stab at what I *think* you mean 🙂

You’ve got a dog’s nose moving around, and you want the text to come out of the nose in some animated way before settling in a straight line. I’m not in front of Motion right now, but there are two immediate ways I can think of to try.

First off, a text path. Draw a shape that’s a curved line turning into a straight one – I’m thinking of an S-shape, with the top part of the S extending straight out to the right as far as you need.

Now apply that shape to your line of text as a path. Animating the path offset parameter should mean that you can make your text slide along the path, so that it curves around the curvy parts of the “S” before ending on the straight line. Position the shape so that that the bottom part is in line with the dog’s nose, and then track or keyframe as necessary to keep it in the same relative position as the nose moves. You should end up with your line of text curving out of the dog’s nose before settling in a straight line.

Of course, that will mean that the text will emanate from the dog’s nose with the last letter first, unless you’re using a reversed S-shape with the line extending to the left. I guess it depends on the way the dog’s nose is oriented in the frame.

It also means that the text will slide on in one piece. If you want the text to build up one letter at a time, perhaps with a pause between each one and with each letter following the same path, I think you’d have to do it with each letter as a separate layer. Not difficult to build, just boring.

[Gareth Randall]

Hi Ann,

Just for future reference, it would be really helpful if you could include some kind of illustrative material, such as a frame grab or a video clip of what you’re working on. It helps us get a better handle on what you’re trying to do, which hopefully leads to advice and suggestions that are more useful to you 🙂

[Patrick Mcmurtry]

Is this by any chance something like you are trying to do? (The moving circle is the dog’s sniffing nose.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slB0EAZE8zE

[Ann Danylkiw]

Yes! That’s exactly it! This is my attempt so far: https://www.vimeo.com/13622059

How do you do it?

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[Patrick Mcmurtry]

Hi, It is not very hard, at least how I did it

1. Type your text in the location you want it to end up in and at the point in the timeline you want it to start animating on
2. Apply the Sequence Text Behavior (under Text Animation)
3. Set the outpoint of the text animation behavior at the time you want the animation of the text to be complete.
4. You then need to animate the Format -> Position parameter in the Sequence Text behavior. I did this by turning on recoding, stepping through the animation, and moving the position every few frames to match the position you want- that goes pretty quick. Make sure that Sequencing is set to “From”, Unit size “Character”
5. When you play back it won’t look like you want as it will have your whole sentence bouncing around and the letters, one by one, moving into their final position. To make the letters look like they are appearing one by one you can do several things:
5a, Easy way: Add Format-> Opacity as a parameter and set to 0%. In this case the opacity of the characters starts out at 0 and goes to 100% by the time they are in place.

5b. If that transition from 0 to 100% opacity is too slow, you can add an Mask to the group that the text is in (don’t apply the mask directly to the text), and animate that to reveal the letters one at a time and not use the face opacity parameter. That takes a little more time, but is not that painful to do.

6. Play around with the Spread (I think I used 3). It will also look better if you use Motion Blur on your final render.

Most people on this forum know a lot more than I do, so maybe they can suggest better ways.

I didn’t spend very much time trying to refine the example – just wanted to see what you were trying to do – so you can make it look a lot better.

If the Sequence Text behavior is new to you, try to find a few online tutorials and also play around with the parameters on your own. For a start try embryo.me.uk and look for the ghost text tutorial

Hope this helps,

Pat