Getting X,Y,Z position of character animated by text effects

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Atomic
Posts: 157
Joined: April 30th, 2007, 5:55 am
Location: United States, Ohio

Hi All,

This may be a tall order, but is there anyway to get the X,Y,Z position, rotation of an individual character that is animated by a text preset?

Say I animate some text using the Ants animation preset. Can I get the postion and rotation values for each character?
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Mylenium
Posts: 139
Joined: July 20th, 2005, 12:07 am

In so many words: No. You would have to write your own code to calculate the font glyph box and based thereon the relative positions, which can be influenced by a bazillion of secondary things (metric vs. visual alignment, faux bold, caps etc.). In addition, you'd still have to find the actual size of the visible character with some sampleImage() trickery, as apparently the glyph box is much larger than the visible presentation. Really too much extra work to make it worthwile plus, even if you then got to extracting the text animator data, you'd have to consider its combo modes and falloff specifics as well. Unless this would be a well-paid job for a very important client, I wouldn't even dream of it...

Mylenium
[Pour Mylène, ange sur terre]
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Atomic
Posts: 157
Joined: April 30th, 2007, 5:55 am
Location: United States, Ohio

Mylenium,

Thanks for the reply, I thought it might be an "undoable" tasks. After looking through the API docs, it looks like font information is very sketchy (I'm still on CS3). I noticed CS4 has a little more information for examining a text layer. But the funny thing is, After Effects does know where all those characters are at at any given time. So the information is locked away inside the program somewhere... :roll:
"Up And Atom

No...No

Up And At Them!"
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