… for Apple Motion

Tip #1425: Cool 3D Text Lighting Tricks

Larry Jordan – LarryJordan.com

All lights can be animated with keyframes so colors and shadows move.

This tip started by asking: “What can I do with directional lighting in Apple Motion?” The answer is: “Quite a lot of very cool stuff!”

Create some 3D text. In the screen shot, I used Optima at 275 points. Enter the text for your title.

• Select the text in the Layers pane.
• Go to Inspector > Text and set Lighting Style to Off.
• Uncheck Environment.
• Everything should now go black because all lighting is turned off on the text.
• Go to Object > New Light and add two new lights.
• Select a light and, in Inspector > Light, set Light Type to Directional. Do this for both lights.
• Point one light – using the 3D Transform tool – toward the text, with the other light pointed away from the text.

NOTE: Remember, with Directional lights, position is irrelevant. Only the rotation direction matters.

When the angles are set, adjust colors and intensity to suit. In my example, the front light (pointing to the text) is pale yellow with Intensity set to 10.

The back light is pointing down and toward the front. Intensity is 100 and the color is dark blue.