Text Characters Uniform 3D Rotation

Question

Let say I have a simple text (first image) :

It's all in 3D and I enabled the "Enable Per-Character 3D" of its Text property as my goal would be to have all individual letters to rotate on Y axis.

The problem is I can't do otherwise than get each letter which its own angle, due to the kind of view of the camera with a vanishing point (2nd image).

I'd like to get what's in the 3rd image, with all letters rotating totally simultaneously with the same angle (with a somehow vanishing point set to infinite).

Would that still be possible without separating each letter and moving each one separately ? How could I perform this?

Thanx to everybody that can bring me some help, I'm very beginner on AE.

Rick Gerard · Accepted Answer

By far the easiest way to get close to an isometric camera in After Effects is to just add a new camera with an angle view of .1º then immediately lock the camera so you don't move it. Here's a series of screenshots with a bunch of W's, Per-Character 3D enabled, and a Rotation animator added with the Y rotation set to 60º. You can see the perspective with the default camera, then the perspective with the camera added to the scene, then a comparison to the Front view which is isometric.

This is about as close as you can get to an isometric camera in AE. You can also go the other way and set the angle of view to as much as 179º. Perspective is controlled by the camera position. The narrow-angle of view will move the camera a long way from zero Z and an angle of view approaching 180º will put the camera very close to 0 Z.

Rick Gerard · Answer

I failed to consider how the text animator works. Turns out the right workflow is to add an Anchor Point property to the text animator and add the offset by the index value to that instead of using a position. That's why your characters are not properly positioned with an offset. Here is a screenshot of how I set up the first two text layers.

I multiplied the index value by .5 because a whole pixel offset gave me an undesirable moray pattern when the characters were rotated 90º. I also tied the material options in the top copy to the material options in the bottom text layer with a pickwhip expression so I could control material options for all text layers at the same time. The expression for Animator 1/Anchor Point looks like this:

[0, 0, index * .5]

The next step was to duplicate the second text layer 28 times so I had a total of 30 text layers. This second screenshot shows the position and settings for two Point Lights, one in front and one in back. I found the second point light worked better than the ambient light for generating shadows. Setting the material options and positioning the lights was critical in getting the text to look extruded. This is how that looks:

You can also use the same basic lighting and material options and just extrude 1 text layer using the Ray-traced rendering option (CS 6), or the C4D rendering option if you have a newer version of AE. The comp will be a lot simpler with that option, but you may run into rendering issues. On my machine, Ray-traced rendering takes about 40 seconds a frame for this comp.

Ray-traced or C4D rendering does look better for this workflow if you can stand the render time. If you decide to go with Ray-traced rendering I strongly suggest that you create a very simple comp with just the camera and lights, then render it using the Render Cue and the default lossless preset or render to an image sequence. Then you would import that render and put it in your main comp with the rest of the layers.

I hope this helps. Sorry about forgetting to check a per-character text animator comp and missing the anchor point offset required to get the text layers to stack up.

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