Make text follow perspective of a billboard
by Richard Swain (Richard)
on
May 2, 2008 at 4:36:42 pm
Hi All,
I'm trying to make lines of text (3 text layers) follow the perspective of a billboard which is at an oblique angle. The text needs to shrink as it appears to get further away (like looking down a railroad track where the rails appear to get closer together). I want to keep the layers as text layers so I can use the text animation. On one line, I'm using the transporter effect, on another line I.m using the evaporate effect etc. I have watched many tutorials and read lots of posts, but so far can't find anything on this. I know I can do this in Photoshop using "Free Transform", but then I no longer have a text layer in AE. Anyone have any ideas?
Re: Make text follow perspective of a billboard by Dave LaRonde on May 2, 2008 at 5:01:55 pm
Put the text in a square-pixel, nested comp that has same aspect ratio as the billboard, and time out your animation.
Do a corner pin motion track on the corners of the billboard. Be careful assigning the trackers to the four corners. Apply the track to the nested comp.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Re: Make text follow perspective of a billboard by Jeremy Allen on May 2, 2008 at 7:16:36 pm
like Dave, I'm assuming you have motion in your billboard footage, and if so, you already know you'll have to motion track it. Even with that, the first thing I would try is to make your text a 3D layer and play around with the positioning and orientation until it looks right. If there's no motion, then you're done after that.
Re: Make text follow perspective of a billboard by Richard Swain on May 3, 2008 at 1:07:56 am
Hi Dave and Jeremy,
Actually, the billboard is static (a Photoshop .PSD file). I found that I couldn't use tracking on a static file, so I rendered it to an .AVI file (which of course doesn't move). Then I followed Dave's suggestions and the result is close. It looks better if I use the Free Transform on text in Photoshop, but then I can't use the text animators. It seems funny that software as powerful as AE doesn't have a straight forward way to transform text. When I get a little time, I'll play around with 3-D text. Thanks to both of you for your help. The project is still open, so if you can think of a better way to do this, I'm all ears (or eyes!).
Re: Make text follow perspective of a billboard by Serge Hamad on May 3, 2008 at 5:06:54 am
Hi Richard,
Did you try switching your text layer to 3D, adding a wide angle camera layer (15mm for instance)and rotating the text layer X-Axis etc... so it fits your billboard perspective?
Re: Make text follow perspective of a billboard by Jeremy Fabiano on May 3, 2008 at 9:48:40 am
Could just precomp the 3 text layers and apply corner pin to it and set the 4 corners with the crosshair thingie in it... no motion tracking required since the billboard isnt moving..
since its just static I don't see why that wouldn't work - apply all your effects and annimations for the text inside the precomp.. that SHOULD work..
Re: Make text follow perspective of a billboard by Richard Swain on May 3, 2008 at 3:27:04 pm
Hi Guys,
The corner pin is what I was really looking for. The main problem I was having (besides not knowing about that function) was the need to precompose the text layers into a new composition. I also tried the camera, Serge. In AE, I liked the way it looked - I think slightly better than using the corner pin. But after rendering and importing into my video editor (Vegas 8), the text layer was screwed up - much larger than the billboard. I haven't had a chance to dig into why that is happening (I do need to complete the project!). Anyway, thanks to everyone for their help. Learning AE is difficult at best. Thanks to all of you, my education has taken another giant step forward!
