Object reveal??

[Chris Smith]

Assign a grad to the alpha and keyframe the grad points to sweep from one side to the other.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Jon Herron]

Gradient shader right????….thanks for the reply also
jon

[Chris Smith]

Yeah. Create a black and white gradient and keyframe the color points over time to your liking. Obviously you can change the Gradient type as well for some interesting reveals. Also add glow on it. The glow will only trigger off the brighter elements. Cool for motion graphics.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Jon Herron]

COOL MAN!! …thats a million dollar tip right there. I never fully realize that you can pretty much animate anything in CINEMA. Thanks chris

jon

[Jon Herron]

Does anyone know where to find the gradient keyframes in the timeline after animating them?? thanks
jon

[Jon Herron]

Nevermind got…..damn little arrows
thanks

[Chris Smith]

also remeber you can right click on the parameter itself and choose show in timeline or show fcurve to see it.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Mark Simpson]

I’ve done similar things like this before using booleans…..

You use a large invisible (boolean visibilty switches turned off) boolean object that completely envelpos the object to be revealed…then you animate the position of the boolean o that it starts to move away from the object to be revealed…As the object being revealed moves outside of the boolean object, that portion becomes visible…

The cool thing about this method, is that you can use a rough surface on the boolean object, and that rough profile will be transferred to the object being revealed at the intersection of the tow…If you animate the surface of the bolean object or rotate it or whatever, then this rough intersection will change as the object is being revealed….giving a very organic look to the reveal…

Also, another cool thing about using the boolean method, is that where the intersection occurs, any material applied to the boolean object, will be visible at the intersection…YOu gan make it look like the intersection is on fire or glowing or whatever…..

Also, when using the gradient alpha method, the reveal, leaves the object being revealed hollow until the reveal is complete…..With the bboolean method, the intersection is always closed, gving a sense of volume to the object being revealed, as well as the different texture…

Have fun…

Mark Simpson

[Chris Smith]

Yeah, I started out using booleans, but the comp would slow to a crawl after you had a bunch of elements all revealing at once, and I couldn’t get nice grad effects, it was always harsh edges 🙁

I think it’s a matter of your final result. Since I use C4D for motion graphics and Maya more for “normal 3D”, I’ve been loving the grad reveals on flat objects (like text) to give them a nice style with almost no hit on real time framerate.

However, I have a challenge for someone to figure out:

go here:
https://www.renascent.nl/motion.htm

and click on the piece named ‘Gestalt’.

Joost does most of his work in 3DS Max from what I read from his articles, rarely doing text and such in a compositor so that the text can interact smoothly with the surroundings like being distorted by refractive index transparency, and what not.

My question is the way he reveals his text. It’s very smooth and if you go frame by frame seems to run along the stroke of his letters. I’m sure you could animate a map in a compositor to drop in the alpha channel, but it wouldn’t be the extact same thing.

So in C4D I made flat text the usual way by dropping the text splines into a loft nurb. Then I used a copy of that text spline and a small cube profile to create a fat sweep nurb then animated the grow parameter. Then booleaned them together. However the results were not only sluggish (real time) but looked terrible from where the sweep nurb overlaps itself.

So any ideas how to do the text reveal in C4D that works along the stroke of the text and not just an arbitrarty reveal?

I suppose I could do the text outlines in AI. Send those into C4D for the loft nurbs. And import the same text into AE and use good ol stroke to create an animated matte to drop into the alpha channel of the C4D text. Any thoughts?

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Jon Herron]

Thanks again for the help guys….I really appreciate it!!!
jon