In this lesson, I want to take a quick break from the Orbe and show you how we can apply this effect
to text inside of Maya.
Now, this scene is available in the project downloads.
I encourage you to open it and check it out to inspect it for yourself.
But I'm going to run through this scene very quickly and then recreate it as much as you need to know
up to this point.
So basically, we've created text with the text tool and then I've duplicated that mesh out and then
separated each letter so that each letter can have the texture to former applied to it separately.
That's all we have so many textured to here, but everything else is the same up to this point.
It's just the matter of creating the text and then getting enough deformable geometry that will look
good as the texture to former as applied to it, and then applying the same effect we've done with the
nerves curve and the texture the former attached to emotion path on it.
And it's just the fact that we're separating each letter, because if they were all on the same texture
to form or they would all loop together and it wouldn't look very unique because it would look like
they're all part of the same blob when their individual letters.
So that just wouldn't make sense.
So that's why I've separated each out into their own mesh and made a textured reformer for each one.
So let's create a new scene.
And before I do that, I just want to show you where this is.
It's called Text Underscore Before.
So I encourage you to open this up.
Everything is the same as the next lesson is going to be at the end of the course.
And I've just added this to basically what we'll complete in the next lesson.
But for now, just to show you how to create text quickly, I'm going to create a new scene.
And to access the text tools, you just need to go to modeling and hit text.
And then I sintered the text and I made the font fairly small based on the current camera we had in
the scene.
And then under the geometry tab, I can adjust the depth of the extrusion here by decreasing that a
little bit.
I can also increase the amount of curvature for the letters themselves.
So there's a bit more resolution there.
And then I can also add a Bevell so that the edges aren't very sharp, so I can enable Bevell and then
I can reduce the Bevell distance down so that the letters aren't too puffed out.
Now, the other thing I can do to give myself some room between letters is to increase the tracking
under text.
If I go here and increase the tracking this way, the blob kind of effect will have a little bit of
gap here so it can be applied to each letter and they won't intersect with each other.
So we can actually increase that beyond ten and type in whatever value we want.
Now we just need to duplicate this out.
So in case we ever wanted to go back to the original one and access this tab here, we can do so.
You can see with the duplicate, we no longer have that.
And this will live as its own geometry.
Now it's going to hide the original by control and now focus on the duplicate.
I'm going to go to the modeling tools and go to mesh separate.
Now we'll separate each piece into their own mesh, each letter into their own mesh.
And I'm going to go to edit, delete by type history and that will just clean up the history of each
object.
And then I want to go through each letter and center the pivot.
So I'm going to go to modify center pivot.
That means basically where the manipulator will show up.
You can see if we don't do that, it will be at the center of the world.
So I've modified center pivot.
It'll snap to the center of that object.
Now that I've done that operation, I can just hit G to access the last operation and select each one
and hit.
The advantage of doing that is then you can use a custom script.
I'm going to provide in the project files and you can also access a YouTube video where I describe how
to use a custom script and how to load it onto a custom shelf.
Of course, you're free to ignore this step and manually place each circle curve at the center of each
letter if you want to do it manually.
But for speed sake, we're going to use the script here.
So now all we have to do is select all the pieces of geometry by dragging them and then running the
script.
That will place a curve on each one of the objects at their center because that's where we want the
texture form to be rotating around.
Now, the last thing that we need to do before we apply the texture of former is add more geometry so
that the faces can deform properly, because as it is now, this isn't enough geometry.
The face is a single face and that wouldn't deform properly.
We need more edges here.
The easiest way to do that in my twenty twenty is go to mesh.
Right, apologize.
It's turned green because it has lost the shader so we can just right.
Click and say assign existing material and say type blent.
Now we can go through and do the same operation with each one of these meshes.
For whatever reason, some of these are losing the Shater and some of them aren't.
It's not that big of a deal.
We can just reassign the Shater to all the geometry that's lost it by going to assign existing material
type blinn.
Now, that had more edges placed on its faces, we can just increase that by smoothing the mesh of each
one of these so we can go to mesh smooth.
Now, you can see that's increase the subdivision's one level and that's all we need.
I'm not going to increase it more than that.
Now we have enough geometry for each one of these to apply a texture to form or as we've already done
and you've learned in this course, go to to form texture.
I'm going to choose the direction normal and apply our 3D volume noise that I'm going to reduce the
amplitude a little bit and go back to the texture itself and decrease the strength quite a bit.
I'm also going to scale up this so it's a bit softer of an effect and then we can do what we've learned
and just constrain this to the curve.
With emotion path, then we can choose the emotion path, UNCAC follow, select it double, click the
timeline, right, click the timeline and choose tangents linear.
Now we have the same effect we had on the orb, but it's on a letter and we can adjust each one of these
to give them a bit more variation by simply repositioning the curve itself.
So even if we use the same scale amount for each texture to form, or we can adjust them slightly so
that each one has a slightly different type of deformation because they'll be oriented differently based
on the curve.
So that's how you do that.
And then you would go through and apply the same material.
And don't forget to go to Arnold and increase the subdivisions at render time as well.
So it's nice and smooth, but everything else is the same for the rest of the course.
You just have to go through each one of these letters and do this so it's a little bit more tedious.
That's why we're focusing on doing it on a single orb.
In the next lesson, we're going to wrap up rendering the orb and how to batch, render and bring it
into after effects for compositing and exporting as a movie file.