[Graham Quince]

For your text in a circle in After Effects, add your text layer, then draw a circular mask. Then in the text layer properties, in Path, choose your mask.

And animate the rotation as normal. You might run into issues getting your mask and anchor point precisely lined up, so the circle doesn’t woggle, but if you use the Transform effect and the rotation controls in that, it’s much simpler.

However, if you want to make this web friendly, then making if a GIF after creating the video is probably the way forward (I tend to use giphy.com rather than Photoshop for GIFs), but you might want to check out this codepen and animate in code instead: https://codepen.io/Lastly/pen/wvwGXme

[Graham Quince]

In Media Encoder, in the Video tab, if you scroll down to the Video is VR checkbox, you can specify field of view. Does that solve your problem. I haven’t tried this myself, so it might not be the answer.

[Graham Quince]

If you make each “stick” a 3D layer, and use lookat(point1,point2) on the Orientation property, the sticks will face the dot. You’ll probably need to adjust the anchor point to be at the end of the stick and fettle with the rotation properties to get it to behave correctly, but that should be all you need to do.

[Graham Quince]

Ah – looks like you have to hold the ALT key down to trigger this now.

[Graham Quince]

Hi @sam32,

I’m not sure what’s happened, but your images don’t appear for me. I’m also not 100% sure I follow your description, but it sounds like you might need to link or move your anchor property so that as you scale up the layer, the position stays constand, rather than expanding on all sides.

[Graham Quince]

When you parent anything to something else, check out the position coordinates, they’ll go from something like 960,540,1000 to 0,0,0. Trouble is Element will still be at 960,540,1000 (or close enough). It’s still there, but out of view.

[Graham Quince]

I don’t think there is a way directly, but… you could duplicate your orb layer or element layer and use it as an alpha matte for the other.

Alternatively, I have a couple of tutorials for making a planet in Element and adding an atmosphere:

Makin’ planet Mercury using Video Copilot Orb or VC Element 3D:

https://youtu.be/s11UuctE6HU

Adding an Atmosphere to a planet using Video Copilot Element 3D: https://youtu.be/InwQg1SVCE8

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[Graham Quince]

Unfortunately, After Effects doesn’t have the ability to change per character styling via expressions – it’s all the text or nothing.

You could fake randomness by creating sourcetext keyframes with lots of different changes, then use an expression to randomly choose a keyframe (I think that is doable) or you could use precomps for each letter, with each frame being a different font, then use time remapping to randomly select the frame. And with Essential Graphics, you’d only have to make one precomp.

[Graham Quince]

There’s several different ways of achieving this. The simplest would be to make your text a prec-comp, then make that pre-comp 3D layer, orientate it so that the left side is next to the person, but further away so it is smaller.

Then in the precomp animate your text layer’s position to slide in across the screen.

[Graham Quince]

I was planning a tutorial on making GIFs in AE, but when I started experimenting I couldn’t get nearly as good compression and quality as is possible with a web service like: https://giphy.com/

I occasionally need to make GIFs to, so I prepare an MP4 and upload it there and download the result.