Text motion around cylinder

[fredoviolawoodstock]

Howdy folks!

I'm doing an animation that requires text to be rotating around a cylinder.   I created it already in AE using narrow masks rotated around an anchor point in deep z-depth, but it does look a little choppy.  Anyone know a way to do an actual cylidrical wrap with motion in AE?  

Many thanks,

Fredo Viola

[P.M.B]

Hi,

Hard to say without knowing exactly how your shot is set up but the easiest way i know of is to use the CC Cylinder effect on your text layer.  Under the render settings of the effect you can set it to render the outside, inside or both sides.  

[angie_taylor]

There's a free animation preset that does exactly this, it's called "3D Rotate Around Circle" and is in the Animation Presets > Text > 3D text folder

[Rick Gerard]

• Create a comp that is 2X wider than your main comp, add your text layer and name the comp Cylinder
• Open the Main comp and import the Cylinder Comp and apply CC Cylinder 
• Use the edit menu to copy the Cylinder layer with property links
• Paste the copied layer
• Find the Render settings in CC Cylinder and delete the expression that ties the two layers together
• Set CC Cylinder to Render Outside on the top copy and Inside on the bottom layer
• Put another layer in between the two Cylinder layers if you want the text to wrap around something

The other option is to create a text layer, add a circular mask, make the layer 3D, enable per character 3D, expose the path options and rotate the text 90º in X and rotate the layer to expose the cylinder of characters.

If you are getting judder when you rotate the cylinder it is usually caused by the relationship between rotation speed and frame rate. That's what makes wheels look like they are rolling backward and propellers to rotate slowly. Let me explain that. Let's say you have a 6 pointed star that rotates 60º per frame. The star points are 60º apart so even though the star is rotating, in the movie, the star is standing still. Change the speed of the rotation and you can make it look like the star is rotating forward or backward or make it stop. It all depends on the frame rate. You almost always have to tweak the speed and try and hide the judder with motion blur. Folks that make movies have had to deal with critical speeds since movies were invented.