- Introduction
- Cloner object
- Effectors - Overview
- Group effector
- Delay effector
- Formula effector
- Inheritance effector
- Random effector
- Shader effector
- Sound effector
- Spline effector
- Step effector
- Target effector
- Time effector
- Linear Clone Tool, Radial Clone Tool & Grid Clone Tool
- Matrix object
- Fracture object
- Instance object
- Text object
- Tracer
- Spline mask
- Displace Deformer
- Extrude deformer
- Spline wrap
- Cache tag / Baking animations
- MoGraph shaders
- Manual and Tutorials
- Goodies / Samples Scenes Etc
- XPresso for MoGraph
- Release 10 and MoGraph
- Conclusion
Text object
One of the key additions in MoGraph is the Text Object. Text is animated often in broadcast spots. To get the text to bend, twist, snake, duplicate, rotate, and anything else you can think of in a way that looks professional and clean, MoGraph has created a new way to make extruded text.
The original text spline was adequate for working with simple extruded text. The MoGraph text object extrudes the text natively and adds several new attributes like scale, rotate, position, and subdivision. The key addition is the Text Object's ability to react to effectors. An effector, or group of effectors, can be used to modify the text on a letter, word, line, or all text level. For example, you can create a text object and then attach the random effector at the letter level. Change the random mode to "Noise" and hit play. Instant dancing text!
There were times when the rotation of the text was unintuitive while attempting to align the letters to a spline effector. The letter were coming out flipped. Converting my helix object to a spline and reversing the order of the spline points ended up resolving the issue. The end results can be quite impressive and we've used the text object in a number of our examples throughout the review. Here's a simple text animation to give you a taste of what's possible.
Click on image to view animation (QT H.264 1.0mb)
One important setting on the text object is the axis setting. This parameter gives you a 2D vector controller that lets you move the axis for the letters, words or lines around. For example, moving the axis to the bottom of the vector means that the letters will scale with an effector from the bottom up whereas the defult is to scale from the middle outwards. This also has a bearing on other things like where the letters, lines or words rotate around as well for example or where the text is positioned when using the spline effector or spline wrap effector.