Intro to typography - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] Like it or not, choosing the kind of font within a motion graphics project says almost as much about the message as the words themselves. In this video we're going to explore some of the fundamentals of typography so we can build a common unspoken language about the graphics we're going to create. If we look in the project currently as I orbit around, you can see I have a graphic representation of a mountain with a snowboard in front. So we need to add some text over the top. Let's go to the Mograph section in our drop downs here and choose Motext. Which is a motion graphic text object. Which automatically creates three dimensional text. So let's add the words all big mountain snowboards. To do that I'll click on my Motext object in the Objects manager. And in the Object channel in my Attributes panel I'll change my text here and I'll type in upper and lower, All Big Mountain. And then I'll press enter to move to the next line and I'll type snowboards in all caps. And when I'm done I'll just click outside of the text box to set my text. Now so I can see it I'm going to to the Font options here and I'll set my Alignment from Left to Middle and I'll hover over the green access handle here so it turns white. And then I'll click on that and drag up to move my text up in the scene. Now I can just orbit around in the scene so I'm a little bit more facing the text directly rather than looking up at it like so. So your type face may look different than mine. I have the default font Segoe set up here. So I'm going to click on this drop down and I'll choose Rockwell. Now you may or may not have Rockwell but if you don't, don't panic. I just want to talk about this style of font for a second. So Rockwell is known as a slab-serif font. Now the term serif refers to these accents here, which were originally created back in the days when people were trying to type a lot of words on a piece of paper. They need to make sure the text was legible. So to do that they created serifs. So the visual view of each individual letter was more easily recognized by the human brain. Now on a screen like this that's not necessarily as important other than stylistically. So to make mass generalizations here about the style of our text, serifs type faces traditionally look more, well traditional. And sans serif type faces traditionally look a little bit more modern. Now this is kind of a hybrid of both, modern and traditional which is very popular style right now. But I want to go straight up modern to go with the clean lines of my modern looking mountain here or graphic looking mountain. So I will go here to my Font drop down and change it from Rockwell and I'll scroll all the way up to the top here and I'll just chose Ariel. Now you can chose whatever type face you'd like but here Ariel creates a nice clean modern look to my type face. So let's talk about type anatomy. Notice the letter G here has this thing that's sticking down like so and this is called a descender. Okay? It descends below the baseline which is this imaginary line that all these letters are sitting on. The top of the T here is called an ascender which is going to mean that the top part of the letter T ascends above the upper portion of these lower letters. Not capital letters but lower case letters. And this height is called the X height. If I type the letter X in here that how high this individual element would be. A capitalized letter would then in turn be called a cap height. Okay. Let's adjust the spacing between the two lines. If I go down here in my Attributes panel and I go to Vertical Spacing and scrub on the up and down arrows I can adjust that space. This space is traditionally known as the leading because pieces of lead actually used to be inserted between lines of type to determine the space between those two lines. Now the horizontal spacing here is actually known as tracking in traditional methods. So I'll go ahead and adjust the horizontal spacing to something like a negative two or negative one here, just to tighten things up a little bit like so. If I want to adjust the spacing between individual letters, I'll go here to the Kerning. Kerning is how you adjust individual letters. I'll enable Show 3D GUI and nothing will change until I go here to my Modeling and enable Use Model Mode. Now I get a little handle over each individual letter. So I want to move this L to be a little closer to this one so it's closer to matching the spacing between the A and the L. So I'll just click on that handle and drag it to the left and now you can see I've adjusted the kerning of just those letters. If I render the scene you can see things a little bit more clearly. So remember, when you're choosing a type face traditionally a sans serif font creates a more modern look and a serif font traditionally creates a more traditional look.