Meet transition

I thought some more about the radiate effect, and I think for the moment it’s a no go, and here’s why. Radiate type things want to be round. Unfortunately, our text is not round, and so unavoidably there will be collisions and overlaps between letters, which will look clumsy. One solution to that would be to bend the text into a circle before radiating it. This would be relatively straightforward to do for a single line of text. For example, you could bend it into a circle keeping the center of the circle in the middle of the screen and it would actually be fairly clean and then once it’s in a circle of course radiating it is no problem. For two lines of text, it’s considerably harder, but still possible. However, for three lines of text it’s really out of the question, you’d have to do something special with the middle line like make it disappear or whatever and so the idea starts to break down.

But while worrying about all of that, it occurred to me that there’s a much simpler effect that would also fit the bill. The idea originally was for text to assemble or gather from multiple directions, not necessarily radially. For two lines of text this is very easy: just have the bottom line move up and the top line move down and they meet in the middle. The name of this effect could be meet, or gather. Another possibility would be to have the top line slide left and the bottom line slide right. For three or more lines of text, the outer lines could move vertically and the middle line(s) move horizontally. Or, all of the lines could move horizontally, odd lines left, and even lines right. But for a single line of text, a special surprise: alternate the letters, so that odd letters move up and even letters move down, or vice versa.

Notice that in all of these effects, there’s no possibility of letters colliding, or overlapping.

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