[Jon Okerstrom]

Jimmy,

ProAnimator is the single best choice for animating text and logos when you want complex motion, quality rendering and ease of use. It works as a stand alone application as well as a plug-in for After Effects. You don’t have to believe me over what your designer says. Take a look at the demo reel on the Zaxwerks site. It’s that good.

It does help to have a fast machine/graphics card and lots of RAM. The same can be said of Lightwave. If you’re working on a mactel machine, you will see slower speeds for After Effects and all of its plug-ins. That’s until AE and the plug-ins go native. With a G5 Quad, it’s entirely possible to get rendering speeds near a second a frame.

I would encourage you to download the demo and give it a try. You’ll be cranking out animations in no time. Complete disclosure: I don’t work for the company and I do have Lightwave 9.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Glad you’re making progress.

If you’re using ProAnimator, you can use the timing>ease controls for transitionsin the advanced settings. If you’re using Invigorator, you can use AE’s ease function or edit the keyframe curves manually.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi daveyg,

I watched the final movie in the tutorial. You can do this effect with either ProAnimator or Invigorator. In both cases you can apply the plug-in to one solid and go from there. I noticed that there are nine objects in the animation, but the @ object does not move. I suspect the animator did this to get around the 8 set limit in Invigorator.

No matter which application you chose, I would set up the letters falling part first, then worry about the camera move. If it’s just text, you can use the text creation tool in Invig Pro and ProAnimator. Otherwise, you can create the text in Illustrator, convert to outlines, ungroup and import that file into either application.

In Invigorator, you’ll need to assign each letter to a different set, then animate the sets.I would animate the first set containing the first letter dropping into the scene and settling into place, then copy the appropriate keyframes, select the second letter’s set and paste the appropriate keyframes in the appropriate places for set 2. Repeat the process until you’re done. Get the first letter’s motion looking just right and it’s really not that bad.

In ProAnimator, I set this up as one object track and use the cascade effect to have them drop one by one into position. You could then use one of the advanced pose options, like offset, to make the letters jump a little as they settle into place.

Does this help?

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Russ,

Thanks for the file. It helps me to understand what you’re doing.

A couple of comments: You’ve used a 100 percent transparent material on the front and rear faces of the object. You can avoid having to deal with any materials at all by unclicking the front and rear faces under the objects tab. They won’t be seen.

Second, I think you’re saying you don’t want the text to appear on its entire path around the edge of the object. You can do this by adding masks to the left and/or right edges of the text layer. Use the masks to make the text insvisible for part of its motion across the layer. Another way to do it would be to create visibililty keyframes.. to turn the visibilty of the text on and off when you want it.

Does this help?

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Does the bounding box go off the screen?

Sometimes people leave stray points or objects in their Illustrator file. Depending on where those are located, it can really mess up positioning of the objects.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Russ,

Above the set-up window, click the material set-up button. That will bring up a cross section of your object with six bays into which you can place different materials. Simply drop whatever material you want into one of the empty bins and drag the number to the part of the cross section where you want it to be applied. You can split edge cross sections as well. If you need help with that, please let us know.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi scalvidgal,

Sure. Save your Illustrator art as Illustrator format. if you’re using CS or CS2, uncheck the compression check box when you save the file. Also, convert any text in the file to outlines and simplify the art to avoid graduated blends and other bit-map-based effects. Generally, simple closed and filled shapes work the best. Personally, I set my artwork up in layers because it makes replacing parts easier.

Does this help?

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Albion,

I suspect it has to do with the fact that translations between file formats aren’t always 100 percent perfect.

I don’t have a great solution for you, unless you can go back to the app and try exporting the same object in a different usable format.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Kevin,

Just to be sure you correctly understood the “Zaxwerks dude”… Random circular motion would be really easy in ProAnimator… the motion controls in Invigorator Classic are the essentially same as they are in Invigorator Pro.

Download the ProAnimator demo and see for yourself.

Have fun.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Kevin,

Try putting the rings in a precomp and adding a mask layer to it so the rings don’t cover the person’s head. You may need to animate the shape or transparency of the mask depending on what the rings are doing.

Jon