> On 06/04/2011 7:40 PM, digitaldad wrote:
>> Hi Folks,
>> I am looking for help in animating a stream of text around a sphere,
>> example
>> "News of the World" revolving around a globe. I remember it being done
>> somewhere
>> but searches of the web have been unsuccessful.
>>
>
> One way to do it would be to put each individual letter in a union

Bad practice, you should NOT use an union to contain a single object.

> centred at the centre of the sphere. Then put all the text unions in
> another union centred at the centre of the sphere. You would rotate the
> individual text unions until you got the spacing you want then rotate
> the final union for your animation.
>

Why put each leter in an union? Each leter is an object and can be 
manipulated as such.

Place all leters in a circle in an union. Have it centered at the 
origin. Use rotate to have the leters move around.

You now only need to place your globe at the origin, possibly wraped in 
an union with the text. You can now locate the whole thing as one unit.

union{
	union{#local Text_pos = 1
	 #while(Text_pos < Text_lenght)
	  text{ttf"arial.ttf" substr(Your_Text",Text_Pos,1),Thickness,0 
translate -Radius*z rotate 320*y/Text_lenght}
	#local Text_pos=Text_pos+1;
	#end
	 rotate 360*clock*y
	 rotate -15*z //to tilt the rotating leters
	}
	object{Globe}
	translate Your_Location
}

Adjust Radius and scale your letters as needed to get a nice spacing.
This gives you solid letters that you can make float around your globe. 
Those leters are flat.

If you want the leters to have a rounded outer surface, then you can 
intersect the letters from a sphere just large enough to contain them.
intersection{[the union of the letters goes here] sphere{0 Radius}}

You can diference another sphere to cut the back side of the letters.
difference{[the union of the letters goes here] sphere{0 Radius-Thickness}}

If you want your leters to travel ON the surface of your globe without 
having any dicernable thickness, then you should use the proposition of 
Trevor.




Alain

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