Starting text, and their respective effects, on timeline

[Torrianthane]

Is there a way to start text in a project, and their respective effects, at different points in the timeline? For the life of my I cannot figure out how to do this?

[Kingston]

You keyframe the Show/Hide attribute of the object.

Pick an object from the object dropdown list. Move the timeline control slider to some position on the timeline.

Click the show/hide "Eye" icon on the toolbar near the top. That toggles the object's visibility on or off at the current timeline position.

[Torrianthane]

Thanks Kingston. I have done this (but maybe not to complete effectiveness), and have noticed that, in the timeline, the text now appears where I want it to, but the effect attached to it picks up at that point in the timeline (having started from the beginning of the timeline). I cannot drag the start point for the effect (in this case an explosion) further up on the timeline so that it starts - say - 2 seconds in when the text it is applied to appears.

[Kingston]

You need to keyframe a value to turn attributes on and off when desired. For example, the fire particle effect has an "emitting rate" value that you change to 0 to turn off the fire. When you want the fire to come on, you increase the emitting rate value. That's how you have to sync up to when the text is shown.

You can move a keyframe, except for the ones on the first frame, by dragging it to a new position. You'll see that it's been moved when you release the mouse button.

You can pad frames, and that will move the particle effect down the timeline by the number of frames you specify.

[Kingston]

Here's how you would do the Blast effect so the blast starts when you show the text.

Click on the "Plug-in Mask" icon for the Blast attribute. A green line with red dots on each end will display on the timeline for the Blast attribute. Drag the beginning red dot to the time you want the effect to start, which would be at the same postion as when you show the text. The blast sequence will start from the beginning of the blast at the new position.

There are some attributes where you have to go one step further. You need to set the Level value to 0 at the timeline position where you want the effect to start. I believe Explosion 2 is like that.

[Cool_amigaN]

Hello and happy new year!

I registered just to point out the obvious in this thread: Apparently, there is no way to proceed with complex compositions on MS3D due to the fact that each object (text, 3D model, etc) and all associated effects must be started, by default, at the first frame of the scene. I can't understand why moving attributes of objects on the first frame are locked and cannot be amended. For sure a hot fix should be easy by Corel (or a temporally "hack" to show us how we can enable editing first frame attributes) because in this way the freedom is severely limited.

Regretfully, hide/show option on complex compositions will end up with a preview screen full of mesh objects and make it impossible to properly adjust them or make it hard to navigate all the time to object manager panel.

The second option (Plug-in Mask), doesn't start the given effect on a certain point of time (frame). Instead it removes the effect for some frames but when it is enabled (visible), starts with attributes assuming as if it was already running. A very few effects can be started manually from the attribute panel+Plug-in Mask combo.

Another problem is that many of the global effects should become key effects instead: Glow, fire and shadow at least, should be able to be applied on a specific object.

Finally, for a program that is intended to be used for opening/credits on VS (among others), the fact that it misses Fading effects (or at least I can't find them) is a major drawback. The only possibility to overcome this trouble so far is to apply fading via VS.

But try to make a complex Credit text (many words, a lot of effects etc), it's a nightmare due to the above reasons.

However, I believe that once more Corel won't let us down and provide a patch with these fixes for us

[david1939]

You can do fading of any object by letting the transparency rise to 100%. Put a keyframe where you want the fade to start, make sure the transparency is 0%, put a keyframe where you want the object (which can be text) to finally disappear, and set the transparency to 100%. Clearly the opposite can be used to fade-in. I usually do a "hide" when the transparency has reached 100%.

[AussieTX]

Kingston,

Thank you I had been trying for hours to make my explosion of my text start half way through the project.
Thanks for the description. I did have the green line up but never tried moving the red dot.
Excellent.

Cheers