Step
2: Mapping text to a cylinder
This is also astonishingly easy. Let's go back to the shape pop-up menu for
the text track on the timeline and notice a couple of things.
First, notice that the default shape is "3D plane." That's what we think of as a regular layer of text or video, but it's called "3D plane" to emphasize that the layer is in fact an object that can be manipulated in 3D space.
To see how easy it is to map text to a shape, though, just set that pop-up to another shape, in this case, Cylinder. That's all there is to it.
To
see what's going on a little better, let's tumble the cylinder forward
a bit. You could do that easily enough by just spinning the wheel on
the tumble parameter in the Controls window, but here's what I recommend
instead: use a 3D Container.
Containers are one of the tools that Boris offers for organizing multiple tracks, which is in fact where we're going. So click the cylinder track to highlight it, then, under the Track menu, select New 3D Container.
You'll see a new container track show up, with the cylinder track inside the container. Now, click to select the new container track and go up to the Controls window, and set the tumble parameter to 18 degrees. You can spin the dial, or enter the number in the dialogue box and hit the Return key.
This
is what your "Boris Graffiti" cylinder should look like now.
Next, click the interpolation box next to the word Tumble, and use the pop-up to select the keyframe interpolation of Constant, because we want to keep this 18 degree tumble held throughout the effect.
(The interpolation of Hold works best between a subset of keyframes within an effect; Constant works best across an entire effect.)
Before
I leave the cylinder shape behind, I want to show you some more of what
it can do.
Click to select the cylinder track in the timeline. In the controls window, click on the Cylinder tab - each shape in Graffiti has a similar tab. The second parameter is Wrap Percent, which offers some fun possibilities.
For example, move the slider down to zero, and you'll see the cylinder unwrap to a flat surface, back to 100%, and it's a cylinder again. You can see that with a couple of clicks you could animate the wrapping and unwrapping very easily.
The other thing I want to show you in this tab is the Wrap pop-up. The default is Around, which wraps your entire layer once around the cylinder, but I'm going to set this effect to One Way Repeat.
You can see here what it does: maps the layer across the front, then maps it again to the back of the cylinder.
We have one more thing to do to finish the cylindrical part of this effect. Mike's original intent with this effect was to have the text rotating, another easy task.
Simply click the Position tab in the Controls window, and select the first keyframe in the cylinder track. Set spin Y to 1 in the top box: the cylinder with text will now rotate once over the course of the effect. Preview to RAM (Command-zero on Mac, Control-zero on PC) to take a gander at how it looks so far.
