Showing how you can create a folding animation using 3D layers in After Effects, Ridvan Maloku walks through creating this little animated title effect. Although it looks pretty straight forward, the interesting part is the fact that Ridvan has chosen to have the type fold on an angle.

This is actually a bit more challenging in After Effects. In making a mask that has an arbitrary angle like this, the pivot for the 3D layer will generally read as world space. That is to say the in rotating that layer, it has no idea which angle you want to rotate based on that layer’s mask.

In this tutorial you will learn how you can fold text in After Effects on any angle that you wantRidvan Maloku - Plastic-Pistols.com

Sure you can move the pivot and alter its orientation, but there is no way to get it precise to animate it folding without it breaking apart or looking incorrect. You could also only create masks that are of known angles – so if you held down the shift key you know that all your angles will be 90 and 45 degrees.

This isn’t what Ridvan has done in this animation. He chose to build what looked right, leaving the problem of how to animate it left in the end. Cleverly, Ridvan uses Adobe Illustrator as a tool for not only creating the masks to be used in the animation, but also as a tool to measure the angle of the mask’s edge.

He then uses this information to apply the proper rotation to the 3D layers in After Effects.

There are plenty of ways to approach this problem. You could probably string together hierarchal nulls along with the translate effect to create a rig that will allow you to segment animation keys and what objects receive what keys.

The problem will still remains – how do you find the arbitrary angle with After Effects not having the ability to understand the relationship between the mask, the 3d layer and local  versus global object rotation in an intelligent way.

1 comment

  1. Steve Thurow

    When moving the anchor point, hold the control key (windows) command key (mac) and the point will snap to the mask.

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