I am trying to create a paragraph of text whose individual letters are instanced onto a point cloud. My results are close but I am getting odd kerning with some of the letters and wondering if I need to make additional considerations when defining the point positions and or perhaps the horizontal(x) scale of my texture mapped grid instances. Currently I am reading each charactery X and Y origin position from the Geo Text comp and creating a point on which to create an instanced character texture.
I have also tried using the Specification Dat/Chop approach to adding movement and while I may be able to use that I feel it is less direct for the results I am seeking. For instance I may want to cull or change individual characters based on attributes which seems like it would be much more efficient and direct solely using Pops.
I have attached a scene that shows my approach and the issue.
one cause for what you are seeing is that the letters are centered in your Text TOP that feeds the 2D Texture array. Set the Horizontal Align parameter to “Left” and the whole thing should be mostly correct.
Also no guarantee that this works with all fonts - usually the instancing approach is most reliable for monospace type fonts.
Small idea for optimization: instead of controlling the Texture 3D TOP with CHOPs, turn off the Replace Single parameter and delete the expression in the Replace Index parameter. Instead turn on Pre Fill. Now in the Text TOP, change the expression for the Text parameter to:
chr((int(me.time.frame-1)%95)+32)
The benefit now is that the Texture 3D TOP will stop cooking as soon as it captured all necessary textures and it will do so automatically when the project is starting.
This looks much better and such an easy fix to change the justification. It seems obvious now that I think about it. I was definitely looking down the wrong path here.