3D text Lighting and Environment controls in Motion

Lighting Style: A pop-up menu to select a preset lighting style for the selected 3D text object. Choose any of the following:

• Off: Disables the 3D text lighting controls. Choose this option if you want to manually add your own lights to the project.

  Note: You may also want to disable environmental lighting. See Modify 3D text environment lighting.

• Standard: Illuminates the text object from the front, from the left, and from the right.

• Medium Center: Creates a soft, flat light illuminating the text object from the center.

• Medium Left: Creates a soft, flat light illuminating the text object from the left.

• Medium Right: Creates a soft, flat light illuminating the text object from the right.

• Above: Illuminates the text object from above.

• Backlit: Illuminates the text object from behind.

  Note: By default, environmental light causes additional illumination to fall on the front surface of the text object. To create a backlighting effect where the front of the text object appears entirely unlit, deselect the activation checkbox for the Environment controls to disable environmental lighting. See Modify 3D text environment lighting.

• Below: Illuminates the text object from the bottom.

• Diagonal Left: Illuminates the text object from the upper-left corner.

• Diagonal Right: Illuminates the text object from the upper-right corner.

• Drama Top Left: Illuminates the text object from the top and left sides, with no illumination at all on the right or bottom.

• Drama Top Right: Illuminates the text object from the top and right sides, with no illumination at all on the left or bottom.

Intensity: A slider to adjust the strength of the lights cast on the 3D text object.

Self Shadows: A group of controls (available when you click Show on the right side of the heading row) to set if and how the lighting causes text glyphs (individual characters) to cast shadows upon the other glyphs in the text object.

When Self Shadows is enabled, two additional controls become available:

• Opacity: A slider to adjust how visible the shadows are. This can be set above 100% to override the effect of the default light shading (based on the lighting model and setup).

• Softness: A slider to adjust how blurred the shadows appear.

Environment: An activation checkbox that, when selected, causes 3D text to appear to reflect lighting from a surrounding “environment.” Click Show on the right side of the Environment heading row to reveal additional adjustment controls:

• Type: A pop-up menu to choose the image, gradient, or pattern that’s reflected. For information on using gradients, see Intro to using the gradient editor.

• Intensity: A slider to adjust the strength of the environment light.

• Rotation: A dial that controls the angle at which the environment image is mapped onto the object.

• Contrast: A slider that increases or decreases the contrast of the environment image. More contrast creates weaker midtones, brighter highlights, and darker shadows; lower contrast creates stronger midtones, muted highlights, and muted shadows.

• Saturation: A slider to adjust the visibility of the colors within the environment image. More saturation creates more visible color; less saturation creates a more monochromatic image.

• Anisotropic: A checkbox that creates more realistic distortions in reflections (when used in conjunction with Finish > Brushed layers or with the Anisotropy parameters in the Finish > Custom Specular layers).

  Note: Although selecting the Anisotropic checkbox improves realism in your 3D text project, it may slow performance.