Hi John,

Thanks - that rings a bell with me too! After more experimenting  I now have several other questions about the Xara 3D functions. I'll see if I can find some documentation.

Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry

I have had a play around and it appears that if you highlight each letter and change them one by one the effect remains, backing up John's theory that there is a formating object between the letters which disappears if you highlight the whole line and delete / change it.

Peter

Hi Peter,

Nice one, thanks!

Did you find any detailed documentation anywhere?

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Peter

Can you get it to work with more then 6 letters?

Additional text is locked to the e and f position in the original - ie if I use an eight letter word then the added letters rotate with the e and f in the example.

John

Hi

Will answer my own question - had a touch of lateral thinking  .

By highlighting each letter in turn and adding 2 or 3 new letters you can group them together to rotate as shown in this clip:

Note I have removed the letter f to give a pleasing effect.

John

Well done, thanks John.

Looks like we're going to have to discover the subtler features of MEP's Xara 3D by ourselves. Although the Help looks pretty good at first sight, I haven't yet found any 'How to' documentation on these trickier animations.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

90% through composing this when I accidentally closed Firefox 

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Peter, John,

Building on your feedback I now understand the basic rules underlying the construction of this carousel effect.

No special control charactes appear necessary. The key point is to select each segment of text and apply options to each of them separately. In this case the significant setting is Options > Animate > Front face only, which has been selectively unchecked. It's easier seen if you also change the colour of the segments.

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While experimenting I used File > Export animation. Can you try this exported AVI please?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4019461/XaraTextDemoExport-1.avi

I cannot get playback in MEP, yet it plays fine in a bunch of other players like VLC, WMP, MPC, etc. Also in VirtualDub, my usual choice for AVI, except that it freezes at the end like this:

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry

I have problems with MEP and the AVI file - when on the timeline it starts to play OK in MEP however after a second or so it breaks up, pixellates and looks like a chroma key has been applied to it.!!!

However if I extract the H.264 into a mp4 file (I used Nero Recode) it works fine in MEP - this suggests to me there is a problem with the avi container rather than the video itself.

Added:  thanks for working out the correct sequence for the animation

John

Hi Terry

The AVI plays OK to about 12 frames from the end whereby it dissappears save for a faint corrupted trace, but starting preview from anywhere but the first frame or scrubbing creates this effect similar to what John described.

In WMP the animation does not appear to complete either, with the "Properties" text not completing a full swing to a flat plane with the first word.

Peter 

Hi John & Peter,

Thanks for testing my AVI.

I wonder if all the Xara 3D AVI exports have the same problem?

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

i revisited this one in VPX6. The Carousel title opens X3DMaker. As soon as a few of the characters are replaced, the effect changes, as you found out. I couldn't find a way to make it work in X3DMaker. I will look again sometime.

Solved! I think.

Using 3DMaker, the Carousel title comes in as Abcdef. A,c and ef revolve together, and b and d revolve together, at different speeds. It's as though there is an effect on each sequence or letter. Thus I stopped the animation, clicked on the text button and using the left arrow key, moved to the right of A. Then shift+left arrow to highlight A. Then I replaced A by Te. Checked result. Fine. Stopped animation, text button, left arrow, shift+left arrow to highlight b and replaced b by rr. Same routine, replacing c with y's, d with Te and ef with st, to get Terry'sTest. Then I played with the other effects. I tried another test including a space after the name. By being careful not to disrupt the effect on the character sets, I was able to make several modifications.

Here is the first result.

Looking back a few posts, I see that John Baker had already solved this. My problem was in MEP2014 that didn't open 3DMaker. Nothing makes Carousel work properly if you edit it directly in MEP. 3DMaker is the only solution.

So, why doesn't 3DMaker open automatically in MEP when Carousel is selected? VPX6 opens it fine. The 3DMaker exe is available in both 2013 and 2014, but doesn't execute. Strange.

Does 2015 open 3DMaker if Carousel is selected? Assuming that it's still there.

The blur effect in my video in the last posting is one of the new Pixelan BlurBender Pro effects, using an animated radial blur preset with no modification by me. They have some really interesting effects with a lot of potential user control.

Hi John,

I'll take another look at this sometime. Note also this from an earlier post of mine:
No special control charactes appear necessary. The key point is to select each segment of text and apply options to each of them separately. In this case the significant setting is Options > Animate > Front face only, which has been selectively unchecked. It's easier seen if you also change the colour of the segments.

More generally, every time I use the 3D text facility in MEP 2014 I vow that I must try to master it. I find its interface rather confusing and use it so infrequently that I constantly have to re-learn it!

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Do you apply Pixelan effects often to your videos and photos? Any particular types of content for which you find they improve the viewing experience significantly enough to justify the extra time spent?

BTW, I've been reviewing some of MEP's built-in effects and realise how few I've actually used in my finished videos! Many are rubbish but there are some I rather like.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry,

It looked complicated at first so I did some research and watched some tutorials from this list. It's actually quite easy, for the basic things. I wrote this before trying out the shapes tutorial. I learned that Enter is not the right thing to do; use Shift+Enter to go to a new line.

Review the tutorials in the images here and there, and if you're really bored, look at how the author created his avatar, the spinning globe, with 3DMaker.

In 3DMaker, you can add pages(Ctrl+Enter but Enter seems to do the same thing), so I copied the modified Carousel text on page 1, copied it to page 2 and modified it carefully. Called it BackSide or something. It works great in the program, but when I quit, it only brings page 1 into VPX6. I exported it to a cfx (with the avi) and it works with that method (blue was not a good colour for the text with a blue background).

Another anomally, 3DMaker gives me the 3D_maker_embedded folder in MEP MX by default instead of the one in VPX6. I didn't check for differences and just changed the path 3D in VPX6. I have to do this in each session as I couldn't find a way to change the folder path in the program. If you find some way, please let me know. The 3D subfolders contains more Animations, Designs, System, and Textures. Note that you can open the X3D files with 3DMaker.

In the TalkGraphics 3DMaker site that I referred you to, a user asked how to use the cfx files that 3DMaker makes if one exports to that format. I replied. Please take a look at my reply. Is there any other use for these cfx files that I missed?

I tried importing shapes from Xara. That is where I found out about the Enter vs Shift+Enter.

Below is a quick (ok, long with a several trials) and dirty 3D animation using some shapes imported (copy paste) from Xara DP10. Not pretty, but the idea was to see if these actually worked. They do.

I another one with a hollow shape and text. Just playing around to see what can be done. I just took a simple rotating image.

Undoubtedly more to come as I learn more. I think a better quality tutorial than the ones I saw, is called for. Anyway, now I know how some of the 3D intro effects were created. Lots of possibilities. Time to try out some of the other animation effects.