How to fade-in text slowly

Getting Started
1

Hi, I’ve been exploring WWT and I’m amazed at its power. However, I can’t get it to do something simple.

I want to fade in text, but more slowly than the ‘Fade in slide elements’ option allows. I want the text to fade in from invisible to full over the duration of a slide.

I’ve tried using opacity to do this but can’t get it to work. I’ve set the text to Animate but if I set the start camera position to 0 opacity and the end to 100 they both end up at 100. If I set them in the other order they both end up at 0. I’ve saved after each and tried with the opacity option in the text properties form and in the right-click menu.

Am I missing something or is this a bug?

2

Hey @thallstd can you attach the tour file with a sample of what you are trying?

I’ll attempt to replicate, but you might try using the timeline (applicable in the windows version) for fine tuned control. If you right click on a slide, you can add a timeline and then add text as a layer to the timeline. Keyframes can be added at specific points to change the text opacity and fade it over the desired length of time.

3

Thanks David. In this case it simple enough that it will be easier to provide a screencast and the steps than an example.

  1. On a new tour add a slide and add text to it. You can leave the slide black
  2. Check the Animate option for the text
  3. Go to Start camera Position and change text opacity to 0 (it will vanish)
  4. Go to End camera position and text is no longer visible. It too is vanished - the opacity is 0.
  5. Change it to 100 then go back to Start camera position.
  6. It is now visible there as well.

It seems that no matter which camera position is used to set the opacity, the other camera position inherits it.

Here’s what happens: https://www.loom.com/share/3c14ca94c66e4677ae702a3eeec2eca6

4

Thanks for the clarification! It seems to me that this is a bug (@pkgw / @astrojonathan) and I am getting the same results that you are: text not fading.

The work around is to create a timeline and add the text to the timeline, which I just verified does work quite nicely. You can play with the color.alpha parameter and that should do the trick! I hope this helps.

5

Thanks again. I’ll give that a shot.

6

@thallstd I’m seeing the same animate/opacity behavior you’ve described. This must be a new bug because this has worked in the past. If you have a github account, you can file an issue ticket here.

(@pkgw & @astrojonathan, I’ve verified that the animate/opacity behavior works as expected for overlaid shapes & images. Only the text is broken.)

1 Like
7

@patudom I created an issue in GutHub. Is there such a thing as a normal turn-around time or regular update schedule?

8

@thallstd, I will let @pkgw weigh in on the timeline, but I know most of the development work is currently focused on the webclient and sdk, so it could be a long while before this gets fixed in the windows client.

I tried to find an older version of WWT where this worked, but it turns out my memory is faulty, and this has always been broken. (I have a note about this from 10/2012 !!, but it seems like this particular issue didn’t get ported over when WWT moved to open source/github).

I think your best bet is going to be the timeline editor (which I don’t have experience with myself), but there are folks here who can help out if you get stuck. Good luck!