nice to see text module start to get some love finally… or at least start planning for it. There are many good suggestions here but one important note i wanted to get on your radar is getting away from the .ttg format. We have a bunch of custom tools we use for slate generation and other things but according to our software dev team: ttg format is a file type that assembles all of the settings for nodes that are not exposed by the API. It’s also not super flexible to update, because it isn’t based on xml or json, which are very common formats and have a number of libraries that read them.
i know there will be the issue of legacy setups if we move away from .ttg but it seems like time to rip off the bandaid? LMK your thoughts…
Other than legals, who is actually making final text design in Flame? Do we need to focus on this at the expense of the things that Flame artists are actually asked to do?
The idea that there are talented engineers in Montreal spending time trying to patch a non-relevant tool, when there are problems with the comp architecture, it’s just odd.
i could be wrong but i think updates to Text were one of the top 3 or top 5 requests for flame. Maybe someone from the dev team can chime in. I admit it’s not high on my personal list but being able to reliably create and edit typography to some kind of parity with other DCC apps might be super important to people in other markets. Getting the kind of interop i’m after with the text module might even allow more to do in flame with text that might be taken elsewhere which in turn could lead to more flame installs which could lead to more dev bucks and so on and so forth…
I hear ya. But my experience is that no one calls on a Flame artist for text design. Our niche is not that. Do we want to spend months of development and dollars chasing something that is not even our target?
Brilliant!
My background is in motion graphics, and I have good sense of what tool is best for what. Let’s focus on the stuff that we’re called to do with this tool.
Just throwing this out here… Instead of re-inventing text in flame would it be possible to more closely work with Photoshop/After Effects in the flame timeline?
I’ve mostly abandoned text in Flame and I have a few tricks to make getting in and out of photoshop faster.
We could probably come up with a lot of features that only 25% of us use, yet took great effort to develop. I personally use text rarely in a creative design situation, but when I need to, I need it. Same as 3D camera tracking, or particles. If Flame is meant to be all things to all people, then it needs to possess the same capabilities as that other applications have. Text has always been considered a basic need in any post environment. I don’t think there needs to be a huge effort to create a 3D text node since we already have all the tools to work with any vector or geometry elements. What we need is a sophisticated title generator that is in line with other 21st century applications, and can interface with the other tools that we have. It’s way overdue. Personally I use it every day. I not concerned with whether I need to light it and give it depth, etc. etc. I’m far more interested in some basic functions that make using it faster and easier. Things like being take to the font I am using when I open the list of fonts, so that I don’t need to scroll through 2000 fonts when I want to make a comparison between thin, regular and condensed.
I typed and then deleted a post similar to yours, GP. No one asks for design from Flame artists in my market and hasn’t in over a decade. The ship has COMPLETELY sailed and is now solidly in the waters of AE/C4D.
I’m on a job right now though that if I could trust Text for simple supers it would save a lot of headache, so that said I’m fine with some mild updates to Text. But trying to recapture legit mograph marketshare is a fool’s errand esp given the difference is sub cost.
I once sent an email to the entire Mill 2d department saying, “I’m going to see the Flame developers, please email me with any thoughts, desires, notes or anything else,” and got three replies.
It’s about getting feedback from users. Like Fred said, text might be #1 on the list but not my list. My guess is there are about 20.000 Flame users out there, we have 2000 users here, maybe 200 of us are vocal.
Autodesk needs to reach out to all those users. I don’t know, allocate a user-scheduled time and say, “We need your feedback. Unless you answer these 5 simple questions, Flame will not start” and give them something like the poll @andy_dill prepared.
I think a lot of us are saying the same thing. I think what would be ideal is a text node that operates like a modern text generator along the lines of photoshop, and can be dropped into an action setup like gmasks or geometry, so that if need be we can use it as a vector element for further manipulation. And it needs to render better. I don’t think Discreet needs to revolutionize the way we use text.
