Create a 3D animated Logo

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

Left click on this icon (which looks like a rubber band), and hold the mouse button down until the strip of icons appears. After that, choose the Abc icon at the top, which creates vertically aligned text, and right click on this icon to call up the Font dialog box. This is a standard Windows feature, so simply select your font style and size. Note that only OpenType fonts can be used, however. Even though TrueType fonts are available in the options shown, they won't be visible in trueSpace.

You can then click inside the preview window to locate your text, and type the words. These will appear as silhouette outlines, as they initially only exist in two dimensions. Your next job is to turn this 2D text into 3D using a process called Sweeping (also known as extruding). This simply fattens the 2D plane by a fixed amount in a perpendicular direction. For instance, a square would become a 3D rectangle or cube, and a circle would become a cylinder.

The Sweep tool looks like a bendy funnel, and can be found nine icons from the left. Right click on this to select its settings. Changing the XYZ figures can create fatter text, with a face that's a different size to the rear, but we'll leave these at their default values. Left click on the Sweep icon and watch your text become three-dimensional.

Your next job is to apply a texture to make it look more interesting. This is more easily performed in Direct3D mode, so switch to this as described previously. Next, open up trueSpace's material library by clicking on the 17th icon from the left, which looks like three coloured balls. The material library consists of a series of spheres that preview the materials in the library currently loaded. However, the default SIMPLE textures are a little whacky, so we're going to load a different set.

Click on the word SIMPLE underneath the material previews, and in the resulting dialog, choose the METALS.MLB library. A selection of metallic textures will appear, so click on one you like (we chose Chrome).

Next, you need to apply this to your object, and the tool with which to do this is grouped with the icons, 15th from the left. Left click on this icon and select Paint Object (a pink funnel next to a brown cube).

Assuming that you still have your text object selected, it will change colour, indicating its new texture. Right clicking on the Paint Object icon calls up the configuration for the material, with settings for the mapping and parameters for its appearance, although you'll need to re-apply any changes you make. When you're happy with how your logo looks, save your work via File > Scene > Save.

Animating your text

Your logo now needs some motion. As 3D objects are made up of geometry and texturing algorithms, you don't need to create every frame as you would when animating real models in the traditional 'stop-frame' way. Instead, you can simply mark example points in the motion, and the software will fill in the rest.

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