Working with text: Kinetic Typography

Support Basics & Interface
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Examples:

I’ve been studying this art form for awhile, and only recently started to try to create it myself, in Flash, Blender, After Effects. Of those three apps, I think I could get what I’m after easiest in Blender. (Flash is too 2-dimensional and I know very little about After Effects).

I have questions.

1. Bringing the text into blender
Initial tutorials I’ve watched for After Effects start out with splitting up the test in Illustrator and laying it out the way you’d like in THERE, before importing into After Effects. Unfortunately, this approach is a challenge in Blender due to the number of curves/points that are brought into a single object. Anything more than about 20 words and Blender slows to a crawl and/or crashes. So, I’ve decided it’s easier to use the text object in Blender.

BUT. This requires a TON of repetitive work. Either type out the entire text into a single text object and then split to curves (but that brings us back to the challenge of number of points) OR type each word separately. If you’re messing with 20-30 words, it’s not entirely impossible, but if you’re doing something like What’s On First by Abbot and Costello, this option is impossible.

Is there a way to type entire paragraphs using the text tool, and then run a python script to break those apart into individual text objects, breaking them apart at space characters?

2. Mass-manipulation of objects.
Once I’ve broken apart all of these words, if I want to change the font, or material to all of these objects, (as far as I can tell) I can NOT select them all and make a change. I’ve got to select each item, change the material, (or object center, alignment, etc) and then go to the next object. Again - when we’re talking 100-200 words, this is not a real option. (Logic would dictate that I would come to Blender with these details already worked out, but humor me, pretend I’m trying out various options).
How can I change the font/material of a lot of texts objects all at once?

3. Let’s back up for a second and address the original point of pain here: Too Many Curves or Points?
When I import the illustrator file, am I doing something wrong that would result in Blender slowing to a crawl? Would scaling the object improve things? In my mind, I’m thinking, no, the number of points will still be the same, but my knowledge of Blender, while spanning a decade at this point, has been skimming the surface at best.
How can I import a paths file that doesn’t knock out Blender?

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I hope I’ve been concise and clear with my first goals. Once I get this project together, I want to make a tutorial for this - kinetic typography is a great (relatively new) art form that seems to be perfect for Blender artists.

And I promise you - I’ve tried doing extensive searches, not only on here but on google in general for these questions. Either I’m asking it wrong or the answers aren’t easily found. (PROBABLY I’m just asking it wrong).

ATTACHMENTS:
My most recent attempt has resulted in a file that I can no longer open in Blender (too many curves is my guess?) but I’m attaching that one (titled leadership).

Leadership (BROKEN file but svg file is included).
http://www.beaurocks.com/art/blender/leadership.zip

Office Space (this one I was able to do using the time-consuming approaches listed above.
http://www.beaurocks.com/art/blender/officespace.zip

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You may want to take a look at my BlendText script. Click on it in my signature. It is a script for 2.49 that allows you to animate phrases at the character or word level.

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Thanks! I’ll definitely check that out. It looks great.

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Just a couple of basic tips, you can select multiple objects and copy materials and other properties from the last selected one with Ctrl+L… in a similar way you can right click on some properties widgets and then ‘copy to selected’. There’s an addon named Copy_Attributes_Menu that simplifies this process.

You won’t be able to copy font atributes this way, but it will work with position, materials or animations… you can then play with the new Delta Transform controls to offset the animation paths.

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Whoah I took forever yesterday splitting apart all my text, re-aligning, re-positioning one by one. I’ve discovered something: Blender hates a ton of text outlines as a single object.

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You could give a try a the build modifier, it gives nice results with curves objects !
It writes the words …

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Build modifier? I’ll look into it. In the end, I went into Flash and did the whole thing - at least so I could visualize how I wanted it to look - and get some ideas for playing around with the text without having to re-learn blender in the process. Now that I’ve got THAT built, I’ll use the movie as a guide for what I’m doing in blender.

More discoveries that have questions:
in Flash, I was able to take groups of words and make them their own movie clips, so I was working with less stuff on the screen at any given time, and focus on each block seperately. I know this is doable in Blender, but is there a way to some how put things away until I want to use them in the movie? Or do things need to be in the 3D space, somewhere (different layers, etc) from the beginning of the movie?

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A build modifier test on curves :
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6495402/maggotIntro.mov
The build modifier on a text object writes them from right to left, so convert the text objects to curves.

For grouping/layering, have to see which fits better your worflow.
For such anims as you showed examples, I would first made some tests before beggining the anim, to find the best workflow.
For ex make a complete layout of the texts objects from top view, all on the same plane in space, make a first basic camera that would follow the words just so they’ll be seen …
Then good luck !

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Thanks so much for your help Delic. I’ll post my progress here.