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Wednesday 28th May 2008

Create a 3D animated Logo

Fancy a 3D logo for your YouTube videos? James Morris starts you off with a simple 3D text animation.

Modelling and animating 3D is second only to programming machine code in terms of complexity. Hard though it may be, it's still fun and 3D can be very eye-catching, so this month we'll show you how to create an animated text logo. After all, you can't post those clips on YouTube without an eye-catching identifying introduction, can you?

The trueSpace is out there

Lots of professional 3D animation applications, including Maya and LightWave, offer a free version but these are usually limited in some way, which is why we're using the old classic, Caligari trueSpace, for this guide. Unlike its peers, the free version of trueSpace (www.caligari.com/products/truespace/ts3) is an unrestricted full version of the software. What's the catch? Well, trueSpace is currently on version 7.5, and the free 3.2 version dates back to 1997. However, it's still a powerful 3D tool, and we found that it works in Windows Vista too, with the exception of the Intel RSX 3D audio features, although we won't be using these here.

You'll be presented with a rather scary interface when you first start trueSpace. The application was originally ported from the Amiga, and it shows. The menu is positioned at the bottom by default, but you can switch it to the top by choosing File > Preferences and checking the TopMenu box. The plethora of buttons along the top of the interface performs the many 3D modelling and animation tasks. Assuming that you've switched your menus to the upper edge of the screen, the top-right set of icons controls the virtual world in which you're working, and the longer strip across the top of the preview window controls modelling and animation within that world (broadly speaking).

Start by familiarising yourself with the preview modes. By default, objects are viewed as wireframes, which is useful when deforming points. However, Caligari was very early in adopting Direct3D, and you can get a good idea of how your objects look by switching to this mode via the sixth icon from the left at the top. Left click on this and hold until the list of options appears. You can choose between 3DR (a software-based preview renderer), Direct3D and OpenGL. With the speed of current graphics cards, Direct3D works well, but it's still often easier to work in wireframe during the modelling stage.

To the left of this are three icons for adjusting how you view the 3D world - panning, rotating and zooming. Right clicking on these brings up a dialog box in which you can specify the dimension of the motion - XYZ, or just one or two of these. In a similar fashion, right clicking on any icon will display the preferences for that icon. Practice moving around the virtual world before moving on to the rest of the tutorial.

Creating your text

You can create entire animated 3D worlds within trueSpace, but the knowledge required to do so would fill an entire book. Instead, we're going to concentrate on creating a simple text animation for use as a logo in videos. When you load up trueSpace for the first time, however, the text tool won't be visible, as it's grouped with the line-drawing tools, with the Spline Polygon tool enabled by default. This is the 14th icon from the left in the long strip of tools.

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