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Space Invaders Text effect….
I’ve got After Effects 7.0
Hopefully this won’t be too annoying of a newbie post, but thought that with all the factors involved, it might provide alot of info to other newbies, with all the parts involved.I’ve tried Searching the threads for the separate pieces of my idea, but I am having a hard time finding what I’m looking for just on the first piece, so I’ll just spell out the full effect I’m going for. I know it’s probably complicated, so even if you just want to point me to separate articles dealing with similar pieces, that would be excellent! …
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So I’ve created two text objects – 1) Is my name (and possibly another line of short text) in Fixedsys blocky text (looks pretty much like old school arcade font), the second I just typed a carat (^) for my “shooter” object.I want my name text to act like the Space invaders aliens going across then down then back at ever increasing pace each time it drops down, and with the stuttered style of the game, one “pixel” (Fixedsys characters’ blocks, not comp pixel).
I then am trying to have my carat character act as the shooter. So far I’ve got a wiggler on the x position so it moves across the screen in random fashion, but I want it to fade-in at the center, then start wiggling, which I haven’t figured out yet.
I want it to shoot, semi randomly and basically end up “destroying” my whole name (probably in 4 to 5 blocks per shot increments, to cut down number of shots required). And since the name text will accelerate with every drop-down, it would be neat if the shooter increased with frequency as well. Just a reminder, I have AE 7.0 but would love to do some collision detection if it’s possible with 7.0
Also, I would love to locate some authentic sounding audio, if anyone knows where I can get that, and be able to incorporate that here as well. I probably could create blips and stuff with Adobe Audition 2.0, but I’ll need to learn how to do that as well. I’ll keep it simple if need be.
Thanks for any help I can get! From what I’ve seen on this site I have alot to learn, but I love learning it!
Aza
Make sure to check out my Heroes Fan Film at http://www.myspace.com/ruesterprod
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3 Replies
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That’s a very ambitious simulation to pull off with expressions. I think you would want to have each letter in a separate layer. I’d have a master expression in the source text property of an invisible text layer that instructed all the letter layers where to be at any give time. It would publish its results as a string which would be interperted by expressions in the position property of each of the letter layers. The string might look like this:
320,240,328,248….
Where the first two number are the x and y position of the first letter, the next two are for the second letter, and so on. The letters’ position expression would have to extract their current loaction from the string.
The text expression in the master control layer would have to keep track of which letters have been eliminated (and position them off screen) and make sure that the remaining letters now move to the edges of the comp before the entire text block moves down.
This is one of those situations where the expression would have to (for each frame) rerun the calculation from frame zero so that it can figure out where everything should be at the current time. Complex stuff. It might be better to use a script, but that’s a big chunk to bite off as well.
Dan
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Thanks Dan.
Maybe I could make do with something that gives the hint of space invaders and could “shoot” each letter off real fast before too many complications got involved.
Make sure to check out my Heroes Fan Film at http://www.myspace.com/ruesterprod
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… well at least, how could I get my little guy to shoot something and destroy a block, in semi random fashion, possibly accelerated? I could start there…
Make sure to check out my Heroes Fan Film at http://www.myspace.com/ruesterprod
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