Subtitles of the Movie

The big question about paint: does it work in 3D space? I mean, we saw the Jitter and Dynamic effects work in 3D. Jitter had a little help from the Sequence Paint Behavior. So the answer is yes and no. It is limited and the reason it's limited is how the shape is created. In this project I have a transparent color solid attached to a camera. In the Perspective View, I'll move the camera so you can see the color solid is a plane that moves everywhere with the focal planes default distance from the camera. And I'll grab the Paint Stroke Tool and let's pick a Style Preset and don't have it Write On and draw it in the Camera View. Now, in the Perspective View you can see that the paint stroke is flat. In the Inspector, the paint stroke has a Geometry Tab and it shows the coordinates for all the control points of the stroke. They are all X and Y coordinates; two-dimensional. I'll rotate the camera again and draw again. There's the stroke flat against our color solid and the focal plane. Even though the stroke exists in Z space, it was created on a 2D plane. The plane that was drawn on is in 3D space but it's just like other objects in Motion; a 2D or flat object in a 3D world. So when you're painting in Motion, you need to think of it as drawing on an invisible piece of paper. The orientation of the paper is set by the view you're in. I can move the control points of the stroke but they simply slide across the plane. They cannot break into the plane's own Z space. What we saw with the leaves project that I was able to move the dabs into Z space with the Sequence Paint Behavior. Yes, that's true but it has limitations. Let's open another project that already has a paint stroke. I'll orbit the camera and it looks like a 3D object. It has a Sequence Paint Behavior and as I scrub the Z Position Value, our stroke happily moves in depth. If this was the only object in our scene, this would be great but it's not. I'll turn on these rectangles and let's orbit again. Because the paint stroke is at the bottom of the layer stack, it never appears in front of the rectangle, even though it looks like it should be based on our 3D view. In the Stroke Tab of the shape, we see a checkbox that says Local 3D. If I uncheck that, then even with the Sequence Paint Behavior, the result is a flat plane. So I want to check that on. Unlike particles, there is now global 3D option that lets us integrate our paint stroke with other objects in our 3D scene. I wish there was but there is not. The best I can do is draw the paint stroke on a plane that is more oriented in Z space. I'll turn off this paint stroke and turn on another one that is similar. This stroke looks like it winds its way around the rectangles in 3D but as we can see when I orbit, the stroke is really flat. It was just draw in a view more oriented in depth. There is a workaround that makes paint work in a real 3D scene but I'll admit, it's not perfect. In this project we have what looks like a paint stroke in 3D space. I'll orbit around. The stroke wraps around these rectangles and is shaped in all three dimensions. This was not achieved with the Sequence Paint Behavior. In fact, this is not a paint stroke at all. This is a particle system that is shaped to look like a paint stroke. In the Inspector you can see that the Speed Parameter is set to zero so the parent emitter is simply leaving particles behind it while it moves. This works OK but you certainly don't have the smoothness of a paint stroke or the variety. Personally, I think the paint dabs are so close to having full particle attributes that I wouldn't be surprised to find full 3D effects possible in a future release of Motion. Until then, a clever placement of the 2D plane that the paint is draw on can certainly give you a 3D effect in most scenes.