hi All -
I believe this cannot be done, but I figured I would see if there was someone out there with the magic amulet that would allow the grouping of text into a drawn object … I have a shoulder patch that is worn by many of my characters and it is a pain to group the patch, then lasso patch and text to move it … if I try to group the patch with the text within the boundaries of the patch, no grouping occurs … so I have to move the text away from the patch, group it , then move the text in … thanks in advance … dan
Try breaking the text apart twice, then adding it to the amulet/patch drawing once it has been broken into graphics.
The command is in the modify menu.
I suspect you know this, but I’ll pitch it out there anyway: If you create the thing as a template, you can use it as often as you need, then adjust it for the drawing your are using it in. With the Perspective Tool you can even tweak it to account for clothing shapes.
Hi Rob -
Thanks - I had tried to break the text apart, but never did execute the command twice … which did the trick … thanks, I really appreciate your help … dan
There is an additional reason to use the twice breaking apart technique. The first break just splits the letters into individual text objects and the second break converts them from being text objects into drawn shapes. So as noted above that makes them deformable and animatible. But additionally if you use an unusual font and then export your work to swf and the client machine does not have that font or you move the project to a different client that doesn’t have that unusual font then you will end up having your font replaced with a default system font. So as a general practice once text no longer needs to be edited it is a good idea to convert it to shapes which then don’t rely on client machine font sets. We end up doing this a great deal when we work collaboratively with other artists on a project as it saves us having to synchronize everyone’s font sets.
Hi JK -
Great rule of thumb … I had always been taught to leave text in its natural form and to avoid rasterizing whenever possible … it definitely seems hard-core rules are bound by the software being used… thanks, Dan
I’m not familiar with that rule, must be a PhotoShop kind of thing? But of course in TBS shapes are vector images anyway. Once converted to shapes, you can deform individual letters and animate those deformations to really give your text a life of its own which is great for creating interesting title work. Maybe I should combine that with the tutorial I writing to accompany my blog articles on key framed animation as it might be really fun to show how to give personality to letters. See you have inspired me, thanks. -JK