Revolving Text

[Jason Smart]

yeah that’s cool. i actually just changed the position of my anchor point so that it rotated around the anchor point.

[David Bogie]

The difficulty lies in placing your globe inside the cylinder. Make two copies, one that renders the Inside, one set to Outside. Place your globe object (which is really flat) between the two layers. You may need to create a mask to hide something, you’ll figure it out quickly.

This is much cooler and more complicated to do as a set of 3D layers. One layer for each type character, wrapped into a cylinder. You can use the Ring of Cows tutorial to set them up and then tip them around to face a null object in the center of the ring.

bogiesan

[Joe Castiglioni]

I read every tutorial I could find here on the cow that involved revolving text and couldn’t wrap my mind around some of the stuff (expressions especially) so I kind of hodge-podged a method together that worked for me.

I achieved this effect in 3D space with each letter as a separate layer. I created a null layer which I animated in a circle from the Top camera view. Then I parented the first letter to the null layer, and each subsequent letter was parented to the layer above it. In order to get the letters not to just travel around the globe in a bunch, I delayed each subsequent letter by an amount of time that was controlled by a couple sliders. Most letters I could delay by the same amount of time and the ‘kerning’ looked fine, so most letters were delayed by a single slider. The letter “i” .. being thinner than the other letters.. was controlled with another slider with a slightly shorter delay time.

And because the letters were travelling through 3D space, I just pushed my cylinder back a bit on the Z axis and viola’.. letters revolving around a globe. (or tire, as it was in my case). I added some looping expression somewhere in there, and got text that perpetually revolved around a spinning tire.

Now it did take around 8 hours to render, and bogged down my computer so much while I was building it that I started growing grey hairs, but it worked. 😉 Maybe I just need more RAM.

Don’t know if that would be helpful. That’s just how I did it.

Taikwanjo