Tag Cloud Effect

[Kevin Dooley]

Should have mentioned:

I’ve seen the CoreMelt effect, but it doesn’t integrate with the comp camera, or allow full control over the “in effect” camera. For instance (unless I’m doing it wrong) I can’t start a camera behind the text cloud or even dolly it too far back from it as there seem to be pretty small and hard limits on the effect’s camera.

Kevin Dooley
Video Director
Lake Pointe Church

[Jeremy Allen]

I bet you could do something similar with particular or maybe another particle system.

I was gonna try to explain it, but I figured it might be easier to make an example. Not sure if this is exactly what you’re going for, but maybe you couldplay with the settings and tweak it to your liking.

76_particletagcloud.aep.zip

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

Cool, glad I could help… The funny thing is, I had to do something similar about a month ago and I went the long way about it, hanging text in 3d, and yes it took quite a while.

As I was working on your example, I thought “D’oh!, why didn’t I do that on the other project!?” Live and learn I guess..

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Kevin Dooley]

Ah! That works… why didn’t I think of that? I forgot you could set the particle to randomly take a still frame.

Thanks!

Kevin Dooley
Video Director
Lake Pointe Church

[Paul Hennell]

Might not be exactly what you’re looking for here – but as an alternative to your particle soloution, and a replacement for ‘3D text hanging’ I’ve used this 3D text script before. Handy enough to be worth mentioning.

—
Only in after effects do children get to pick and whip their parents.
https://hennell-online.co.uk

[Kevin Dooley]

After playing with Particular, I ended up using Paul’s script. It allowed me to make sure every piece of text was displayed and displayed only once. Unfortunately with Particular you can only choose Random when you use a still frame of the source comp. This left me with a lot of repeats of certain text strings and none of others. Though in the future, where specfic text is not needed, particular allows easier random motion and velocity of particles, etc.

Kevin Dooley
Video Director
Lake Pointe Church

[Jeremy Allen]

Yeah I wondered if that might be a problem for you. I even tried to only emit as many particles per second to match the number of frames in the precomp, but it was still random.

I’ll need to check out that script. Always looking for more efficient ways to do stuff.

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Gardiner Welch]

I realize that this is an old post, but was wondering if anyone knew of a way around the random / repeat problem mentioned in this thread.

I have done something basically similar, but instead of a text cloud I have magazine covers that are emitted. Problem I run in to, which is mentioned above, is that I get repeat covers even though I have more than enough variety in my source layer to keep that from happening.

Is there a control setting I am missing that would allow me to control exactly what is being emitted?

Can post an example of what I am talking about if this makes no sense whatsoever.

Thanks,
Gardiner