A recent forum question asked for an easy method of animating text along a curved path.  This solution makes use of the Convert Last Selected Shape to Motion Path feature. It’s quick and easy to do. Read on to find out how…

Steps:

1. Place your text
2. Select the text and use ‘Break | Break Into Shapes‘ to make individual shapes for each letter.
3. Ungroup the group so that the shapes appear in the top level of your movie.
4. Draw your motion curve. The Pen tool will draw a nice bezier curve but you could use any shape.
5. Select the end letter (i.e. whichever is first to move) and then select your motion curve shape.  (Note that the motion curve shape must have an outline. You can adjust this in the properties panel for the shape.)
6. R-click Convert | Convert Last Selected Shape to Motion Path. Initially use the default options. This will create a sequence of move effects for the chosen character.
7. In Timeline select the sequence of Move effect you’ve just created for the single letter and copy/paste it into the Timeline for each of the other letter shapes but offset the start of the move by a few frames.

You don’t have to use text. Any shape can be moved along a path using this technique. Note that the sample movie comprises of two scenes. The first scene shows the animated text, the 2nd scene shows animated shapes. In the second scene I placed an arrow on a bezier curve, duplicated it and inserted offsets at the start of each animation effect. Admittedly it needs work to look good but you get the idea.

Download SWI – flowing_text.zip

Enjoy!

Tags: motion path

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Max3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.