N.O.T.A
By Gary Zullo aka MrPixar
Plugin Review
Hey there fellow Attackers! This time I am going to talk about NOTA, a plugin created by now famous, Renato Tarabella. So, what does NOTA mean anyway and what will it do for me? NOTA stands for "Not Only Text Animation" and could quite possibly be the most useful tool in C4D's toolbox for handling multiple objects succinctly. Generally, the theory behind creating a plugin is to add lacking functionality to an application, or to make simple, something that would otherwise be too complicated, or take too long. Some address the former while others address the latter. NOTA is one of the few plugins that I have used in my time that actually addresses both lacking functionality _and_ workflow speed increase. Add to that the fact that there is no complicated setup or any complicated dialogs to wade through while setting the parameters. Simply create your object hierarchy, add the NOTA tag to it, and you're off and configuring. Shortly thereafter you'll be rendering an animation to make anyone jealous :
As you'll note once the NOTA tag is added to an object hierarchy you
have _complete_ control over how your objects will be animated. In order for NOTA to work you are only required to do the following: 1. create a keyframe that will act as your end frame position 2. specify where the objects will start from by using and referencing a null object That's it! Seriously!! The rest is tweaking and configuring the settings and optional splines etc. to suit your needs and taste to whatever you may be animating.
added to the position, rotation and scale (depending on what you specify) at the point defined in the graph. The Spline panel allows you to manage motion splines to be used with NOTA. In this case, if you use a spline the starting position will become the beginning of the spline. The neat thing about using a spline is that you can enable looping of the objects. So, when the objects reach the end of the spline the loops around to the beginning to make a seamless animation for you. The oscillation panel allows you to give the objects a wavy feel (oscillation). Incredibly you can control not only the axes, in which oscillation will occur, but the amount (and even phase). The sort panel will determine the order for new objects based on the distance of each object. Reversing the curve would effectively reverse the order, etc.
The tag panel gives you access to the "basics" of NOTA. These include parameters such as Duration to specify the length of the object's animation, Animation shifting with the Step, Frame offsetting to determine animation start point within the timeline as well as locking axis position and/or rotation on any of the three axes. The offsets panel is just that...you can use a nice graph to define X, Y or Z offsets that will be applied after all transformations which means you can use curved trajectories rather than linear translations The random panel allows you to control the randomness of the object contained within the hierarchy. In this case a random value will be
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The kerning panel will give you the ability to adjust the spacing of the objects in all three axes. Kerning holds the same meaning here as it would with typesetting. It's defined as the adjusting of the spacing between letters (or objects here). My first impressions of NOTA reminded me of my web design days and using flash. There used to be an application called "swish" that I would use to make extraordinarily hard text-based effects with a few clicks of the mouse. NOTA is the same in its operation - but offers so much more. Don't let the fact that it's got "text" in its title fool you into thinking that text is all it can handle. Renato is constantly upgrading this plugin, so I'm sure we can expect
