Type animation around 3d cube

[omera29058523]

Hey Guys,

I’ve been puzzling around this for a while and couldn't figure out how to do it properly. It seems really easy to do it but I’m a newbie so any suggestions would be amazing. Here is a really nice example of what I'm trying to achieve. nikita iziev on Instagram: “387 DS19 more development work for the degree show identity, trying to g...

nikita iziev on Instagram: “250EDGE”

Thank you!

[Mike_Abbott · Accepted solution]

Looking at your example: look in the top left an consider the word "DEGREE". Essentially it's flowing around two sides of a cube.

Decide on the size of the cube sides - say 720px x 720px.

Create a new comp which is twice the width of this: eg 720px high x 1440px wide.

Animate your text moving through this comp from left to right.

Precompose this comp - make it 3D

Duplicate it.

Name the two precomposed comps 'front' and 'side'.

Now mask the 'front' comp to just show the left hand side (720px x 720px), and mask the 'side' comp to just show the right hand side (720px x 720px).

Arrange your two comps to form the two sides of a box in 3D space.

Job done for that text.

[Mike_Abbott]

...you might also be able to 'fake it' with just a standard 2D layer and one of the distortion fx.

[Rick Gerard]

Start here:

1. Create a new comp called text comp
2. Create a text layer with some sample text on it
3. Make the layer 3D
4. Add a square solid to the layer the size you want your cube (1000 X 1000) and name it Set Matte
5. Make the label color of the Matte layer different than the text layer to make selections easier later on
6. Set the Z anchor point of both layers to 500
7. Make the Set Matte layer 3D and parent it to the text layer
8. Set the Set Matte layer as a track matte for the text layer
9. Select the pair of layers and duplicate them 5 times
10. Use Select label group to select all text layers and press r to reveal the rotation property of all layers
11. Start with Text layer 2 and rotate them in this order: 2 - 90º in Y, 3 - 180º in Y, 4 - 270º in Y,  5 - 90º in X, 6 - 270º in X
12. Now you have a perfect cube made of text layers - Select all layers and turn off parenting
13. Select the Matte layer's label group and shy them
14. You can adjust the x position and z position of the vertical layers to make the text wrap around the corners. X for layers square to the comp panel, z position for the layers that are perpendicular
15. Adjust the size or scale of the so it does not wrap around the corners
16. Nest the Text comp in a main comp and collapse transformations
17. Add a camera and lights and animate them to move around your cube of text
18. If needed to clean up the corners you can try and change the blend mode of all the text layers to Alpha Add

That should do it. It's pretty easy to manipulate the comps if you add an extra viewer and lock one to the main comp and one to the text comp. You could do the whole thing in one comp if you like and add a 3D null to the center of the comp and parent it to all the text and matte layers. The project would look like this:

Here's the project file: Dropbox - Text Cube.aep

(if your browser adds a TXT extension to the AEP file you can just delete it)

The other option is to just use C4D lite that comes with AE. You can create a cube there and texture it with anything you like. You'll get a better job in the long run.