Title Animation and the End in Sight

Finals are just around the corner and it’s definitely time to get cracking! This week, we are going to focus on creating a title animation for our demo reel.

TITLE ANIMATION

For the title, I will need a 3D rendering of my name and contact information keeping in mind that this will play at the beginning of my demo reel. Start by opening Maya. For the text, I will use the in-Maya text creation. Go to Create>Text Options. In the Text option, you can type in your name and play with other options, like text style, beveling, etc., in the gooey.

After the text is completed, select it in the perspective window and go to Modify>Convert>Displacement to Polygons so we can play with the text. Delete the original text plane and rename the displacement copy to whatever the text is. Now, go into the Animation window, Skeleton>Joint Tool.

In the Front window, create a joint chain down the text polygon. In the hierarchy, select all of the joints and shift select the text polygon. We will now bind the joint to the actual polygon so we can change the configuration of the text without selecting each individual letter. Go to Skin>Bind>Smooth Bind Options and make sure that max influences are set to at least 3.

With the joints bound to the “skin”, you can now have fun with the polygon and shape it to whatever you desire! I used a transfer key along the y-rotation axis in order to wrap up the text into a spiral. To smooth out my animation and give it some life, I messed with joints in the Graph Editor.

I selected all of the joints in the hierarchy again and highlighted their points in the graph editor. I moved the points down the graph editor’s timeline in order to offset some of their actions.

AFTER AFFECTS

All I had to do for the comp was import my files into the bin, play them in the timeline, and go to Composition>Make Movie. I put output as a quicktime movie with a .png compression and rendered out the movie.