Moving Text Around a Path

Author: Trent Schwarz


This tutorial covers basic text generation, and shows how to get an object (in this case - the text) to deform and follow a circular path. It is assumed that you have an understanding of the locations of toolbars (create, modify) and transform buttons in MAX (move, rotate, scale), and some understanding of 3D principles.









Creating the Circular Path


First, (if you haven't done so already), load or reset 3D Studio MAX.
In the top viewport, create a circle SHAPE.

This is a 2D shape, which you can access by going first into the CREATE toolpanel on the right, and pressing the SHAPE button at the top. Select the circle tool, and move your mouse cursor over to the TOP viewport.





Many of the 2D shapes and 3D objects in MAX are created using a click-drag method. Create the circle by LEFT mouse clicking in the middle of the viewport, hold it down and drag outwards to create the circle.

Make it around 60 units in size.



Creating the Circular Path (cont.)


You should get something in the top viewport like this.



Okay, it's not award winning stuff, but that's just the start.




Creating the Text


Next, create the text 'Flashkit.com' with a font size of 20 in the top viewport.
Text is also a shape. Although we can make it 3D at any time (in a minute, in fact) it's still in essence a 2D shape. You'll find it three below the circle tool in the SHAPE toolbar. (ref shape toolbar image above).
Once selected, the text options menu will appear



Select a suitable font (arial is bog standard boring, but will do fine for the purposes of this example), and enter '20' for the text size.
In the large white box underneath, you will see the words 'Maxtext'. Change this to 'Flashkit.com' or your name, or perhaps some sort of stupid phrase or two if you're so inclined, just keep it short for the exercise.



Creating the Text (cont.)


Creating text only requires a single left mouse click in the top viewport. Anywhere will do, we'll shift it around later.



Conforming to The Path


Once we've extruded our text, we need to get it up and boogying. We're going to add another modifier, this time getting our object to deform and bend around a path (our circle). On the modify panel, click the 'MORE' box at the top. This will bring up a huge list of additional modifiers we can choose. Under the top section - 'World Space Modifiers', you will see the 'path deform' modifier.



Highlight this, and select OK. We've now got another modifier applied, and have to change a few things to get it to work the way we want.




Select the text you've created, and apply two Modifiers - Extrude (1 unit), and WorldSpace PathDeform.
You may or may not have worked with modifiers, this is a simple exercise and will assume that you haven't, or haven't had extensive experience with modifiers.

A modifier is a command that MODIFIES our object or shape. It is set up in a cue, first to last. It is important to understand that the order in which you apply modifiers can affect the final result. Modifiers can (mostly) be altered, changed, added, removed, or their position in the stack moved up or down at any time, and most things can be animated as well.

Make sure the text creation tool is switched off by right mouse clicking in the top viewport (it's an easy thing to forget, soon you'll find you've got five or six unwanted text objects in the scene and can't figure out how the hell they got there).


Making it 3D
Now we're going to make our text object 3D. Select our text object, and then click on the modify tool panel. The modify tool panel is the tab NEXT TO the create panel.



Click on the EXTRUDE modifier. This will stretch our text into 3D space, and make it solid instead of outlined. Enter a value of 1 where it says 'amount'.
Leave the other options, their settings are fine for now.




Conforming to the Path (cont.)




Okay. First of all, we need to pick (select) the path we want the text to deform to. To do that, we press the PICK PATH button, and click on the circle. Top viewport, Perspective viewport, doesn't matter. You'll see some instant results - the text has bent around and done some weird things. To get it to behave, click the 'move to path' button at the bottom, and constrain the 'path deform axis' by selecting the X axis radio button at the very bottom of the toolbar (see the above picture if that doesn't make any sense).

Once we've done that, we need to put the text where we want it. Adjust the rotation parameters to -90 degrees. The text should now be sitting on top of the line, and is bending around, following our circle.
Animate the text around the circle from 0 - 100% over 100 frames.


Animating the Text
Okay, now we bring it to life. Press the ANIMATE BUTTON, move to frame 100, and in the PERCENT area of the path-deform modifier we've just been playing around with, enter 100. Switch off the animate button, and press the PLAY button on our controls in the bottom right.
WOO HOO! Round she goes.




Stuff to Experiment With
Also bear in mind that the original path shape doesn't have to be just a 2D shape. Try experimenting with your circle by applying an EditSpline modifier, selecting SUB OBJECT, and VERTEX in the little drop box to the right of that. Once done, you can use the move tool to move the vertexes of the circle up, down, left, right, whatever. You'll notice the text moves around to follow wherever you place those vertexes.



If you want an object to merely follow a path without bending and warping (say - a rocket ship flying on an obstacle course), you need use a different method - a controller (instead of a modifier), which we will go into in a different tutorial.

3d cloud text effect

A Creative COW 3ds Max tutorial

Morteza Yousefi Tehran, Iran ©2003 by Morteza Yousefi and CreativeCOW.net. All rights are reserved.

Article Focus: In this tutorial, Morteza Yousefi demonstrates how to create a 3-d cloud text effect using Discreet's 3ds Max. Beginner to intermediate.

Download 3ds max project file here

Create 3d text in max like this Now make Particle Cloud and pick 3d text that you made Load cloud / smoke Set use rate to 500 Set speed to 0.2 and variation to 100% Set life to 10 and variation to 25 In frame 0, set size to 8 and in frame 25, set size to 85 Set variation to 50% and fade for to 15 In particle type, choose facing Create 2 wind force as you see in picture below. Set strength of wind 1 to 0.2 and turbulence to 0.2 and frequency to 2.0 Set strength of wind 2 to 0.2 Now make a gravity force as you see in picture Set strength to -0.3 and select spherical Bind this 3 force to your Particle Cloud You'll need to create a material. Go to material editor and set the options below for your material click on face map in opacity choose gradient and in Gradient parameters in color #2 choose noise and Radial for Gradient Type and in noise parameters set size to 20 in frame 0 set color #2 to white and in frame 35 to black in frame 0 set phase to 0 and in frame 35 set to 10 now copy this noise to color #3 and assign this material to your Particle Cloud Make an omni light and if you want a puffy cloud you can use ray-trace shadow Hide your text You should see something like this in frame 0: You should see something like this in frame 15: and in frame 25: Download the max file here if you haven't already. Discuss this technique in the Discreet 3DS Max* forum at Creativecow.net.

Create an Exploding 3D Fluid Text Effect

ON JUL 20 IN PARTICLE SYSTEM BY PAUL

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create an exploding fluid text effect using 3DS Max and Photoshop. Recently I made a tutorial presenting how to explode a 3D planet and here is a little bonus presenting how to explode a fluid. So let’s start!

Scene Concept

In the original concept this scene was meant to look differently but as I started simulations and rendered some test images I decided to simplify it a bit because it would take days to create what I really wanted to with 1-core 1,8GHz processor that I was working on that moment. Anyway, original idea was to create some text filled with paint that is slowly running out of each letter and flies away. I’ve ended up with wavy water exploding from each letter so it’s slightly different but still looks cool  .

A new scene

Open up 3ds Max. First let’s create some text so go to the Splines and look for Text. I suggest to use some bold and clear font because it will be much easier to create water pouring from the letters’ faces. Some good fonts include Arial, Helvetica, Futura, Adobe’s Myriad so choose one of them.

Text Setup

We’ll need three or more different objects for text. Spline from the previous step is just a beginning.

• First one is just a flat text will Extrude applied to it that will be used to create particles in front of the actual letters (so place it like this on the scene).
• Second has Bevel applied to it and the outline set to five. We will use it as the border of each letter.
• The last one is a regular text with Bevel applied to it. This one will be the center part of each letter. (place it inside the second text object).
• At this point you can plan how should your text look like and add more layers if you want it to be different (for instance you can add another border or round some edges).

Placement

You should now have something similar to this scene on the image below. Place the second object inside first but let it stick out a bit and the third object in front of the first and the second.

Glu3D – Fluid Plug-in

To create a realstic fluid we’ll use Glu3D plug-in for 3ds Max. If you don’t own one you can download a demo version on 3daliens website. After installation restart 3ds Max and it should work. The last thing is to right-click somewhere in the 3ds Max’s toolbars and enable glu3D toolbar.

Setting Up Particle Flow

Select the thinest word and apply a material with opacity set to 0 to it. After that go to Particle View (6). Create an Empty Flow, Birth Event and add in all the necessary elements like Position Object, Force, Shape, Age Test. At the end create pFlow -> Glu3D operator that should be now available for you. If not your plug-in doesn’t work and you should reinstall it or turn it on manually by going to Customize -> Plug-in Manager.

Particle Flow Forces

Create a wind and a drag by going to Space Wraps -> Forces in the top-right menu of your 3ds Max. The settings really depends on what you are going to do with this effect. If you don’t want to have as wavy water as mine just decrease turbulence a bit. My setting for wind are 0.05 for strength, 0.4 for turbulence, 0.4 for frequency and 0.5 for scale. In the drag’s settings I’ve only changed Linear Damping values from five to 25 for each axis.

Particle Flow Settings

Back to Particle View (6). I’ve prepared a screenshot that contains all the setting used there so just modify them. They are close to standard setting but we’ve increased a number of particles to 20,000 because Glu3D will need lots of them (maybe even more) to create a detailed fluid. We’ve also changed the emit stop parameter from 30 to 10 and that will make these 20,000 particles appear on the scene during first 10 frames of the animation. We’ve obviously added forces (drag and wind) to particle system and we’ve added our invisible text as a Particle Emitter. There’s also a Destination Directory parameter in pFlow -> Glu3D options. I suggest not to change it yet and I’ll explain what to do with it in the further part of this tutorial.

Other settings

Our scene should look like on the image below. Note how I’ve placed the wind. It’s rotated a bit upwards (like 10 degrees) because we don’t want particles to fly straight horizontally but rather fly off the surface first and than start to fly to the right.

Converting particles to Glu3D fluid particles

When I was starting to write this tutorial I didn’t know how to use particles from 3ds Max’s particle flow inside Glu3D and I found a short solution on 3Dalien’s forum which works fine. You can find the solution here:http://www.3daliens.com/glu3D/forum2/index.php?topic=574. Anyway, I’ve prepared the condensed version:

1. Click “Select destination” from the pFlow -> Glu3D options panel and select a folder to store your particle flow files.
2. Create a Glu3D system but delete its emitter and press play button (or GO).
3. Make sure some new files appeared in the destination folder and create a glu3d emitter.
4. In the emitter’s options select source type as “import from PFLOW” and choose the directory you’ve recently created.
5. Press play button.
6. Press “Build Surface from the start of the playback range” button in the glu3D toolbar and you are done.

Materials

Material for borders of the letters is just VrayMtl with diffuse set to white.
Second one for fluid is a bit more complicated. There are several different ways you can create water material so feel free to use your own material. My material looks like this on the image below.

Vray rendering engine setup

It’s a simple scene so I believe you can render it with any rendering engine with similar results but I prefer to use Vray. The settings are very close to the original ones but I’ve turned off default lights and used HDRI instead. I’ve got a little library of HDRI maps so I just picked one. You can download some free HDRI maps from the Internet and use them here if you don’t have any. Click on the screenshot to enlarge.

Rendering

At the end render your scene. I rendered only three letters at first with resolution set to 640×480px. Then I did the same with the next two letters and finally I rendered “.com” part of my image. Save your renders and alpha maps for them.

Background

Create a 1920×1200px Photoshop document and fill it with black with Paint Bucket Tool (G).

Compositing Fluid

Paste your renders into Photoshop and get rid of thier background. I used Alpha Maps to cut the letters out of the image. If you aren’t sure how to do it simply visit my previous tutorial about 3D space explosion and look for heading called “Cutting These Things Out” which explains entire process.

Sky

Sky can be created by simply using Brush Tool (B) or Gradient Tool (G). For the colors use some light shades of blue like #8bcff6 or #439cdf. You can also download a clear sky image and blur it a lot by going to Filter -> Gaussian Blur… I’ll leave it up to you.

Water

Water was rendered in Vue Infinite but even if you don’t add any water to your image it will look good anyway.

Adjustments

I made several adjustments by modifying color, contrast, brightness etc. of the image. There’s no one firm solution on how to do it so just play with the setting all the time. I hope that it won’t be a problem to adjust your image.

Finishing Touches

At the end you can paint some clouds or add some text to it. To paint clouds I used free cloud brushes from here: http://redheadstock.deviantart.com/art/Clouds-II-Photoshop-Brushes-91356293 (by the way this is my favourite pack of all cloud brushes and I’m sure it will be useful for you as much as it’s useful for me also in other projects). Each cloud is on separate layer and the background clouds’ layer has its opacity set to 15%.