Motion's text formatting, styling, and animating capabilties are deep – and when combined with Motion's realtime playback engine, creating text-based animations is downright addictive.
This week on Motion Magic, I show you how you can wrap text around an object in 3D space. The object can be anything on a transparent background: graphics, video with an alpha channel, or even other Motion objects like particles or replicators. The trick is knowing where to go to make a few changes. You need to lay out the text along a path, you need to rotate the path in 3D space, then rotate the letters themselves to stand up on the path. Another key step is switching the group containing the text and the object from a default 2D group to a 3D group. While adding a camera does this automatically, you don't need a camera to create this effect.
Finally, I show you one way to animate the text using a parameter behavior. I usually prefer behaviors over keyframes for this type of ongoing animation: they are faster, more flexible, and easier to adjust.
If you'd like a copy of the project used in this tutorial, you can download it here.