wrinkled text effect (like Heroes) – how do I do it?

[Roy Messinger]

In ‘Heroes’ TV series, you can usually see it at the start of each episode. The name of the episode is written on a stair (for example) and it is deformed and has the shape of the stair.

Roy

[Jack Watts]

From watching a compilation of each episode on youtube it really depends on which way you want to implement the text into the scene. For the basis of the text moving either on the X or Y axis simple tracking of the footage within after effects will suffice. When it comes to more complicated scenes involving rotation or position modification you might have to use a 3d tracking program like boujou. Now another method would be using the shatter effect in AE and manually keyframing the properties of the variables within the plug-in to match the 3d environment that you are compositing into. This would be long and tedious and not to mention tiring, and i personally would jump into boujou if available.

“Simplicity over limitation”

[Elad Menashe]

There are several ways to pull this through.
Programs like Mocha or Boujou can help you specify the plane or the way the camera moved in real life (respectively).
To get the wrinkled text effect (as if the text was on the cloth) you should use displacement mapping, I’d start with setting the cloth as the displacement map for the text and see how it goes and adjust it from there.
The displacement map effect is found in Effect > Distort > Displacement Map.

Andrew Kramer had a tutorial on how to work with Boujou

There are alternatives to Boujou, to name a few: PFTrack, Realviz’ Match Mover Pro (though they don’t sell it anymore) and there’s another freebie one which I don’t recall its name.

Hope that helps
Elad

[David Bogie]

You got another answer to this same question on adobe.com. Might want to go back to all of your forums where you’ve asked the same question and tell everyone whose advice and which techniques you used and how it worked out for you.

bogiesan

[Rhett Robinson]

Check out the tutorials here by Aharon Rabinowitz on displacement mapping (miss his regular contributions already!),that will get you going, If you don’t want to buy add’l software…

there’s also a nice vid tutorial on Artbeats

https://www.artbeats.com/s3/assets/episodes/full/episode_003.mov

as well as a PDF from a number of years ago that gives some really good tips. I think to really get what you’re hoping for you’ll have to make a text comp, then do the displacement mapping to that comp, not a plain text layer.

Good luck!

[Anton Volkov]

ok

[Roy Messinger]

Ok, I used Bojou, and the tutorial of Andrew Kramer, and it turned out amazing!
Same as Heroes…!
Thanks alot!