Impact 3D OSC is a remake of an older title with far more customization control featuring 3D Text, material, lighting, dust and coloring controls.
Tag: 3d
Hinged CRT User Guide
Hinged CRT Generator
User Guide
I want my LiveType® TV!
This is not a complicated effect. It’s basically a drop zone with window dressing. This effect requires the installation of a special font used to create the 3D text effect graphics (included with the plugin download).
This generator is auto animated via the optional Build In and Build Out parameters. The Build In animates the CRT up into view with a turn (just like the original). The Build Out turns the CRT and pulls it back out of the scene. There are other controls that can be keyframed to customize animations however you like and they can even be used to supplement the default animations.
There are sixteen default animations, eight standard and another eight with the turn direction reversed. CRT is animated from scene edges (top, bottom, right and left) and the Long descriptor means horizontal orientation of the CRT while Tall means vertical. The turn for all orientations is screen up to face front. The turn, if Change Direction is checked is screen down to face front.
First trick:
Set up the Hinged CRT generator as if it were a completely finished effect including all keyframed animations. Blade through the middle of the generator (all keyframes will remain intact) and change the Build Out animation to move in the opposite direction by selecting the Change Direction checkbox.
Parameters:
The Zoom slider will increase the size of the CRT to slightly larger than 1920 x 1080. For larger format media, use the Video Inspector Scale All parameter. It will still look great!
The Horizontal, Vertical and Rotation Offset parameters can be used to customize animations, even the Build In/Out animations already in progress! Rotation reorients the entire Hinged CRT model, not the CRT in the hinge mount.
The front screen “glass” effect looks a little lame… due to the nature of 3D surfaces in Final Cut, there’s not much that can be done. A Reflection Amount parameter has been added to help reduce the otherwise sharp edge effect in the glass. Another technique to disguise its appearance is to rotate the CRT about -7º to shift the shine slightly and smooth out the edges.
The next section of parameters deals with the Drop Zone. Select the Drop Zone source well and FCPX will present a “two-up” display in the Viewer. Select your source media from the Event browser. If your media is to be video, then as you mouse over the video in the Event Browser, the cursor will change to a pointing finger and you should see a skimmer bar. Keep an eye in the viewer and where you click on the Event thumbnail will select your first frame of video to be used. If choosing an image? It doesn’t really matter where you click.
The Drop Zone can also be filled with any kind of video you create in the storyline. You can combine video, photos, titles and generators just as you would for your normal video presentation. Bundle all the pieces to be used into a Compound clip and select the starting frame from your compound clip right in the storyline. Once you fill a Drop Zone with media in the storyline, you may simply delete that media from the storyline and the drop zone will retain what was placed in it. This is especially convenient if you need to simply place Title text in the CRT without having to make a compound clip. Once loaded, reuse the title for another instance of Hinged CRT or simply delete or “hide” the title (typing the V key on any kind of selection will toggle its “visibility” [or turn on/off audio as well.])
There are Pan and Scale controls to help align and/or fit video into the CRT screen. You may also changed the background color of the dropped material (e.g. text) with the BG Fill Color. The color selected will appear slightly different due to the design of the 3D model. Color “richness” can be compensated with the Contrast, Brightness and Gamma controls at the bottom of the parameter list.
Bad TV options are on be default but minimally used (scan lines). Unchecking Bad TV will present a “straight” media image with no “old TV” effects.
Waviness is a good way to provide “glitch”. Keyframe a jump into Waviness to last about a second and jump back out (reset to 0).
Roll is best used by setting from one extreme and keyframing to the other depending on the direction of the roll. That action will give two “flips” through the image and looks convincing even when the Drop Zone media is scaled down (creating a rather large border between the two rolled images).
Static, like waviness, is best used in moderation, but the choice for all of these features is yours!
Reducing Color Sync will give the image color edges (faded red and cyan – probably looks somewhat “cool” with red-cyan 3D glasses :D).
Old TVs were very “flexible” in their display of onscreen images — the Saturation control can help with that little bit of realism as well.
The next three parameters deal with scan lines. You really have to play with them in conjunction with each other. The number of effects achieved cannot be enumerated here.
And last, the previously mentioned Contrast, Brightness and Gamma Controls. These can be used to adjust the actual dropped image in the Drop Zone.
Have fun!
[LiveType® is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc.]
Demo video:
Vegas Baby Title
Vegas Baby User Guide
A Title for FCPX
The iconic Las Vegas Welcome sign was designed in 1959 by Betty Willis. It is in the style of “Googie Architecture” (FYI). She gave the design as a gift to the City of Las Vegas without copyright. It is in the public domain.
Vegas Baby is a 3D Text title for Final Cut Pro. It requires FCPX 10.3.4 or better, a video card with a minimum of 1GB of vRAM, and the installation of a specialized font (ZZSCVegasBaby-Regular.ttf) responsible for the “neon” letters and the sign shapes (it will be necessary to restart FCPX after installation of the font).
Vegas Baby is a complex effect with flashing lights and special textures (coin faces) and animations on two separate sides. Expect long render times. When dealing with the title in the FCPX storyline, it is best to set the View > Quality to Better Performance. Since Vegas Baby performs “reasonably well” using Better Performance, it was deemed eligible to be released. Please be patient with it!
Vegas Baby features an easily customizable “banner” (circled letters) and drop zone panels on the front and back sides. Separate titling for the front and back panels. Titling and drop zones can be combined. Complex text formatting will need to be handled via imported image/video or by creating compound clips in the storyline. An example would be any text message with more than one font used.
A 3D OSC (on-screen control) has been applied to this effect. For this reason, none of the text in the title is editable in the viewer but text boxes have been added to the Inspector to make text changes. To use the OSC simply single-click on the Vegas Baby panel and wait about 1 second. A Rectangular outline will appear and a 3D directional control will appear near the center of the rectangle region. It’s a hack… but it works. You can use the 3D control to keyframe rotation, but positioning via keyframe will have to be manually done with the parameter values in the Inspector. [Note: the OSC is a text character itself which is editable in FCPX – ignore anything you see in the Text Inspector as it pertains to this character used for the 3D onscreen control. If you accidentally change the character, its default is the character zero (‘0’) and its size is 856.0 if you find you need to manually reset these values.]
The Coin Features (Banner) Section
The neon letters in the circle shapes at the top of the panel are considered the banner. As with the real sign, the front surface of the circular regions have the pattern of a 1922 “Peace” silver dollar. The “coins” are not “regular” and each surface of the original WELCOME sign have different rotational orientations for the coins. This title has a feature to force them to align if you so choose — set the Coin Rot. Variance to 0% and set the Coin Rotation to orient the faces to the same angles across the characters of the banner.
In the Circle Text entry, you can enter anything from deleting the text (to completely remove the circled characters) to whatever you think can fit on a single line and still look good as a sign ;). Whatever you enter will apply the characters (only a-z lowercase [and space] are supported), the coin circles and the rim “ring” lights. A space character will add a small separation between letters.
There is a fundmental “lighting” structure to this 3D model. Sometimes expected colors may seem darker (or lighter) than the values provided in the inspector. Make visual adjustments in the Viewer and don’t rely so heavily on the numerical values. For times when even the “brightest” color is not bright enough: the numerical values of the RGB color can be adjusted to greater and less than the absolutes provided by the corresponding sliders. Click on the individual numerical values for the R, G, and B elements and drag up to go beyond 1.0 and drag down to go below 0 (towards -1).
Due to the design of the template, text is not editable in the viewer. For each panel, there is only an option for one font. If you need more complex textual design (more than one font, or font and graphics) create a compound clip in the storyline from titles and other graphics and add the compound clip to the drop zone for that panel. You can delete the compound clip from the storyline immediately after adding it to the template.
Flashing light animations will be affected by lengthening or shortening the time of the Vegas Baby title. Longer times will slow it down; shorter times will speed it up. Recommended length in storyline is about 5 – 15 seconds (10 is default). Ten seconds is a good length of time to leave this title active to give the viewer time to take in the whole effect.
The rest is fairly typical.
Published Paramters
ANIMATION CONTROL
Position — It is possible to position this template in the view with an OSC (described above). However, if you want to keyframe motion, you cannot use the OSC to make position changes. Use these parameters “manually” for keyframing. Another benefit of these parameters: no matter what rotational orientation you have set for the template, these parameters will move it in tradition X, Y & Z axes relative to the Viewer. Using the OSC: rotation changes the XYZ axis orientation as well. Position parameters override that orientation.
Rotation — Unlike Position, Rotation can be keyframed using the OSC. These parameters do not override those set in the Viewer.
Hide Stand — The blue stand can be removed from the scene to reduce the template to the basic sign.
Glow Amount — This is set to 3 by default. In general, this setting is likely the best setting. However, you can raise this value to create more “light halos” or turn it off altogether.
COIN FEATURES
Circle Text — This is where you enter the text for the “banner” section. Only lowercase alphabetic characters (a-z) are used for the effect. Other characters will not provide the correct visual effect.
Text Color — Keep in mind that this is supposed to be a neon-like light. You will want to adjust this color to a value that will be enhanced by the glow effect.
Circle BG Color — By default, this is set to 90% white. You can set this, and all colors in this template to “supercolors” (element values greater than 1.0 or less than 0.0).
Coin Face Intensity — This determines how dark the “marks” are that create the coin “face”. Setting this to 0 will fade the coin face out completely creating a solid color background for the neon characters. Setting this value to maximum intensity will help “punch through” the pattern if you adjust the Coin BG Color somewhat darker.
Coin Rotation — The “real” Las Vegas Welcome sign has 1922 Peace dollars painted on the backgrounds at varying angles of rotation. This is set at 360 (straight up) to help with the Variance (see below). When Variance is set to zero, all the coins are rotated to this value.
Coin Rot. Variance — The variation from one coin to the next for the rotation. When Coin Rotation is 0, this has no effect. When Coin Rotation is non-zero, this parameter will randomize the rotation between 0 and the Coin Rotation value.
Var. Random… — This is the Random Seed generator for the Variance. Click the “circle arrows” to generate a new “seed” value and change how the coins are varied.
Ring Light Color — Each character in the banner also has a “ring light” — another “neon” (or florescent) type light around the rim of the “coin” background. Use this parameter to change its color (default is white).
Emit Intensity — This parameter will change the brightness of the Ring Light color.
FRONT SIDE/BACK SIDE
(each section has identical parameters, both of which will be outlined in this section.
Front (Back) Text — Use this text box to enter the text you want to appear on the sign panel. This can be used in conjunction with a drop zone (always appears on top).
Collection — Font Book “collections” are supported with this template. If you manage your fonts with collections, you can set the collection here. For example, you have a collection of just “script” fonts, you can set this parameter to your scripts collection then search for the script font from that collection you are looking for without having to navigate a font menu that might be hundreds of fonts long.
Font — Same as from the Title Inspector provided here for your convenience.
Size — Same as from the Title Inspector provided here for your convenience.
Color — Same as from the Title Inspector provided here for your convenience.
Weight — This is a feature of 3D text. You can use this parameter to change the thickness of characters, make them more bold or more thin. Best practice: hold the Option key down while dragging the numeric value for more refined alteration.
Line Spacing — Same as from the Title Inspector provided here for your convenience.
Tracking — Same as from the Title Inspector provided here for your convenience.
Baseline — Same as from the Title Inspector provided here for your convenience. Use this parameter to help vertically align the text where you want it to appear.
Drop Zone — Optional. Drop Zones are pre-loaded with a transparent PNG so that the typical drop zone “symbol” does not appear.
Pan — Use the X and Y parameters to adjust the alignment of the image in the panel.
Scale — Use this parameter to size the media to fit within the panel.
Front (Back) Brightness — As mentioned above, this is a 3D model and lighting is affected by things like angle of rotation. You can use this parameter to help override a “too shadowy” look, or tone it down if it’s too bright.
Keep up to date with Sight-Creations on Twitter and Facebook.
A good place to see all of my effects as well as several tutorials and other demonstrations in use is on my YouTube channel.
More About Santa and Rudolph
3D models in Apple Motion are essentially text. True 3D is only available to text objects and in order to create a model, the parts must be part of a “font”. Character shapes are simply vector shapes and if you know how to create a font, then character shapes can be whatever you need to assemble the “characters” into whatever you can imagine. If you purchase one of our 3D model projects, you are essentially purchasing a font with a pre-assembled project (generator or Motion project) to go along with it — something you can use right away!
Our latest 3D model is the somewhat cartoonish Santa and Rudolph:
Designing a human face is an extremely difficult task and would bring the rendering speed of the project down to its knees, so to speak, so Santa and Rudolph had to be simplified.
The point is: this project is basically a font and this post is to let you know that there is a bit more to the font than used in the project.
There are characters to create boxes and bows:
And included in the font are 21 snowflake designs:
Snowflake characters can be used to “dress up” the package wrapping or create a snow emitter effect for FCPX.
The original project was intended to be only the sleigh! And then it became much more ambitious, but as it was being developed (and the font was developed first), it became clear that it would be necessary to keep certain things as simple as possible — nobody needs a generator in FCPX that going to take more than ten minutes to render *just* to be able to “play” without skipping too many frames. The decision was made to stop at Santa and Rudolph. Santa’s bag was simplified to two characters and no attempt was made to decorate the sleigh beyond what is available as basic 3D Substance options.
That doesn’t keep you, the end user, from developing your own projects with this same font. If you purchased Santa and Rudolph, then it’s in your license to do so. This post is to make you aware of the availability of these extras!
If you purchased Santa and Rudolph, you can download this “extras” bundle containing two Motion 5.3 projects that pre-use the characters. The “packageDev” project is depicted in the “boxes” demo image above and uses the characters for the square and elongated boxes and their tops as well as the character used for the “bow” which is developed using a Replicator. The project demonstrates how to colorize the boxes and create a ribbon effect. The three square boxes have the bow linked to the position and rotation of the top and moving the top in 3D space will keep the bow in position. That task is a little more difficult with the oblong box and these demos have not been fully developed yet. The snowflake demo is set up with a replicator: each character is set up as a single sequential frame within a group which is cloned. The clone is replicated so that the sequence can be played like video. If you change the replicator to an emitter, you can create your own snowstorm with each flake appearing in random order, just like in real life.
Please remember that your use of any of our model fonts have licensing restrictions. You can create whatever you like from them, you just cannot sell or distribute the fonts in any way.
The Apple Watch 3D Model that wasn’t released
Developed in August 2015 but never released. Why? Apple never made the San Francisco system font available to other applications (system only) and the fonts are only available to those who have an Apple Developer account. Furthermore, developers could only use it for interface “mock ups” (although this model might qualify). The Mickey Mouse watch face would have never been included because it is © (and trademarked) by the Walt Disney Company… probably forever.
This model’s features:
built in clock display (which runs fast – it’s just a demo)
front “glass”
animatable position/rotation parameters
animatable dial/crown rotation
animatable button
drop zone w/Pan and Scale parameters
drop zone position and rotation parameters to animate turn effect
clock position and scale (in case of repairs!)
glass reflection intensity control
I developed a generator to go with this model:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dZ7560xcUc (dated Aug. 29th, 2015)
which is a frame accurate, settable and customizable watch.
The second half of this watch demo (the activity monitor) was another generator I created for the watch drop zone (also not released).
The state of this watch model/Motion template is in limbo.
I may develop the text font for this clock myself when (or if) I have the time as a substitute to the required version of San Francisco used in its making.
Pixar Textures – a must have for Motion 3D
Pixar Textures - a must have for Motion 3D
PixarTextures-toMotionContent ⬅︎ Download this Zip file and unzip it in the Finder. Original texture files can be found here: https://renderman.pixar.com/pixar-one-twenty-eight (released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.)
Instructions:
Type command-N to open a new Finder window.
Type command-shift-H to open your Home (user) folder.
Double click the Library folder (it’s available again in El Capitan!)
Navigate to Application Support > Motion > Library > Content.
Drag and drop the Pixar Textures folder into the Content folder. (You can trash the zip file sources.)
Restart Motion. Navigate to the Library tab > Content and you should find the Pixar Textures folder in the right column. Selecting the folder will open the collection, ordered by folder, in the content pane at the bottom.
In the Test folder, you will find the NTSC color bars test pattern, and two Macbeth Color Checkers.
These are some of the finest textures you will find anywhere for use with Motion 3D Text. Each texture pattern comes with an image and a “bmp” (bump map) version as well as a “normal” version (new and improved bump map). They are licensed under Creative Commons, available for personal or commercial use (attribution to “Pixar Animation Studios” required.) I am even allowed to transform and repackage these textures in this manner for use in Apple Motion.
May 8, 2022
The complete set of Pixar Textures has been made into two effects for Final Cut Pro. Use with Effects Masks > Color Masks and/or Shape Masks to use these textures in your videos without having to go into Motion.
All Texture images are used in these effects can be found in the effect’s Media folder.
All texture images have been converted to JPG format.
[Not included: NTSC Color Bars Test Pattern and the two Macbeth Color Checkers.]
Keep up to date with Sight-Creations on Twitter.
A good place to see all of my effects as well as several tutorials and other demonstrations in use is on my YouTube channel.