Cascading Fade Text Effect

In order to complete this tutorial you need to have a good knowledge of Smoke/Flame interface and know where the buttons are located. The difficulty of the exercise is pretty low and you should be able to complete it in around 10 minutes tops.

You can create this effect using the Text module on the desktop or straight on the timeline (if you're in Smoke) and with any video you want. I entered the Text module with the option of None and typed "Smoke"

Once you're done typing the text you want you'll want to hit Alt+A. This will select all the characters you've just typed.

Next I'll center de text. In order to do this you can use a pretty handy shortcut that will center it for you. Just hit Alt+Z+5 (the 5 from the numpad).

If you want you can try out the different numbers from the numpad to see what each does. But basically what this does is it send the text to the region of the screen corresponding to the position of the number on your numpad

Note: It is important to note that the center numbers (8, 4, 6, 2) will work once you've already centered the text (alt+z+5). Then just type the desired position.

For example:

alt+z+5,

alt+z+8

This will put the text on the upper middle part of the screen.

Continuing with the exercise we've started, a good thing to do is in alignment set Center and also in the Layer controls (swiping down the cursor in the middle of the screen) also select Centre. We do this so that when we scale the letters they scale from the center and not from the top left corner.

Once we've done this we can start animating the text. In order to do this on the first frame i've done the following:

Size: 200

Fill: 0 %

I've increased the number of frames available to 30.

And then set the following values while positioned on that frame (30)

Size: 139

Fill: 100 %

We're almost done. The last thing to do in order to have this cascading effect on the letters is to go to Animation. There you will see the different parameters that can be animated. Click the Paragraph triangle in order to expand it and see all the characters.

Please note that im on the Animation->Tracks view.

Now the only thing to do is to offset the animation track for each of the letters a couple of frames. Just click on the middle square for each of the tracks and you'll be offsetting them. It should look more or less like this.

Note also that i've added some more frames so that the text effect doesn't get cut-off.

Now you're done. Applying the same principles you can animate the text any way you like and apply the cascading effect. Here are some result videos of what you can do:

It's a Quicktime so remember to hit Play on the Bottom Left Corner.

Animation in Character Rotation + Character Y Coordinates

Arturo Camacho. 2007.

Questions? arturocdl [at - @] digitlogic.net