Rotating text around an object in 3D space

[KulGary]

Hello!

I am a novice at animation and I've been trying to figure out how to do something.

I've been searching a way to have a 2D character, and have text rotate around it in 3D. Since I know this is not very descriptive, I'll post a picture with what I mean.

I've tried using After Effects but I'm not experienced with that program and even tho I have seen a tutorial on how to do it with it, I can't seem to figure out how I could implement it in Animate CC.

By the way, I use Adobe Animate CC 2015.5

[RandomlyFish · Accepted solution]

You could do this using 3 keyframes, first where the text is on the left and squished, second where the text is in the middle with a normal size and the last where the text is on the other side and squished again. Then just use classic tweens and custom easing to make it look like the text is orbiting around the center.

First you should add a text and convert it to a symbol by right clicking on it and selecting convert to symbol. Now that it's a symbol, you can animate it using classic tweens.

Next you should right click on the timeline to add more keyframes, perhaps on frame 10 and 20. Then on the first frame, place the text on the left and using the free transform tool, squish it. On the second frame, place the text in the center and on the last frame, do the same that you did on the first, but put it on the right side.

Now to make it move, right click between each frame and create classic tweens. this will make the text move linear between each keyframe. To give it the effect that it's orbiting around, you can add some custom ease.

To do that, click anywhere on the first classic tween and open the properties panel, there you should see the tweening tab. Click on the pen next to ease. At the top of the window, there's a checkbox for using one setting for all properties, for this you should uncheck that. Now looking at the graph, if you click on one of the black squares at the bottom left or top right, you'll see handles appear. Click and drag those so that the line curves down. Do the same for the second classic tween, but make the line curve up.

To make it do a full turn around, click and drag on the frames to highlight them, then right click and copy frames. After that, right click after the existing frames and select paste frames. Then to flip it, hit Shift + Alt + E to edit multiple frames. Now you should see a gray box above the timeline with dots on either side. Drag the dots so that the box is above all the frames that you pasted. Now click and drag to select all the text on the stage. With it selected, open the transform panel (Ctrl + T) and click on the first button att the bottom, to flip the selection horizontally.

Lastly to make it turn around an object, you either need to move the second half of the animation to a frame below the object, or move the object to a frame above the text.

For added effect, you could add a color effect through the properties panel, to make the text darker when it's not in the center and facing forward.