[Patrick Mcmurtry]

Hi, It is not very hard, at least how I did it

1. Type your text in the location you want it to end up in and at the point in the timeline you want it to start animating on
2. Apply the Sequence Text Behavior (under Text Animation)
3. Set the outpoint of the text animation behavior at the time you want the animation of the text to be complete.
4. You then need to animate the Format -> Position parameter in the Sequence Text behavior. I did this by turning on recoding, stepping through the animation, and moving the position every few frames to match the position you want- that goes pretty quick. Make sure that Sequencing is set to “From”, Unit size “Character”
5. When you play back it won’t look like you want as it will have your whole sentence bouncing around and the letters, one by one, moving into their final position. To make the letters look like they are appearing one by one you can do several things:
5a, Easy way: Add Format-> Opacity as a parameter and set to 0%. In this case the opacity of the characters starts out at 0 and goes to 100% by the time they are in place.

5b. If that transition from 0 to 100% opacity is too slow, you can add an Mask to the group that the text is in (don’t apply the mask directly to the text), and animate that to reveal the letters one at a time and not use the face opacity parameter. That takes a little more time, but is not that painful to do.

6. Play around with the Spread (I think I used 3). It will also look better if you use Motion Blur on your final render.

Most people on this forum know a lot more than I do, so maybe they can suggest better ways.

I didn’t spend very much time trying to refine the example – just wanted to see what you were trying to do – so you can make it look a lot better.

If the Sequence Text behavior is new to you, try to find a few online tutorials and also play around with the parameters on your own. For a start try embryo.me.uk and look for the ghost text tutorial

Hope this helps,

Pat

[Patrick Mcmurtry]

Is this by any chance something like you are trying to do? (The moving circle is the dog’s sniffing nose.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slB0EAZE8zE

[Patrick Mcmurtry]

Thanks for the tip Mikey,

I tried doing some rotating of the group without the exact success I was looking for, but I probably could have given that more time. I’ll play around more with your suggestions as I want to understand this better. In case you are interested, the solution that worked for me was to add a transparent object at the center of the emitter, and then add then apply the “orbit around” behavior to the emitter (X and Z axis checked for my case), with this null object as the source. It gave the behavior I wanted and I can now nest different particle generated spheres inside of each other with different rotations. It is still curious to me that I can scrub the parameter and see what I want in the canvas, but not animate in during playback. Your description helped me come to terms with that.
A useful short description of this from discussions.apple .com is at
https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2267763&tstart=0

Thanks again for your helpful comment. Pat

[Patrick Mcmurtry]

Thanks for the simple solution!

Pat