[Mel2000]

Thanks for your continued advice Jon, you’ve been extremely helpful. I’ve just got this last hump to get over.

From what I gather, you want the “circle on a 2D image” background image to be located inside the rotating text.

Yes.

In this case the best way to do it is to create a primative plane, position it where you want it in 3D space and apply the image to it. If the image has a proper alpha channel, you will see only the image surrounded by the rotating text. The edges of the plane go away.

But I don’t want the rest of the image (actually a background video) to disappear. I simply want the 3D text to circle around a specific circular image in the center of the background, leaving the rest of the image viewable, but uncircled. Everything is working fine so far due to your advice, I’m simply finding that the matte color function doesn’t seem to work. The matte is not applying itself to the sphere primitive I placed in front of the 2D globe. The sphere is only used to give the text something to circle around. However, I don’t want that sphere to show up on the final video.

Page 398 of the ProAnimator-ProModeler User Guide (Making 3D Objects Circle Around 2D Elements) shows pictures of the exact effect I’m after.

[Mel2000]

Thanks Jon. I’m still in the “read the manual” stage with ProAnimator, but I’ll certainly give your recommendations a try and let you know how things turn out.

I followed your instructions and got the animation to work fine, and learned a lot more about ProAnimator in the process. My new problem involves the next part of the process: The matte “color” doesn’t seem to work.

As stated before, I aligned the 3D sphere in front of the circle on the 2D image. The sphere was colored blue and I selected the radio button for the matte texture/color. The texture/color thumbnail showed as a checkerboard, which I expected. When I selected the sphere and dragged the checkerboard onto it, the sphere remained blue, even after I rendered it. I tried all this with the color checkbox checked, and unchecked, but it made no difference. I need some advice on what I am missing here. Thanks.

[Mel2000]

Thanks Jon. I’m still in the “read the manual” stage with ProAnimator, but I’ll certainly give your recommendations a try and let you know how things turn out.

[Mel2000]

Thanks Jon,

Sorry for the omission. I was talking about ProAnimator.

[Mel2000]

Thank you for your prompt reply Jon. Although the ProAnimator interface could stand to be more intuitive, your tips helped me a lot. I’m hitting the manuals and tutorials now and understand quite a bit more about applying, scaling, and resizing textures, backgrounds, and planar objects than I did 2 days ago. But there’s still much more to go. Thanks again.