Q: Custom lighting environments for 3D text?

Christopher Landy wrote:

... are we limited to the nine offered by Apple? ....

That question is a bit misleading, for sure you can create your very own light situations - but, you're right, no option to SAVE such a set (as you can in FCPX with color-corrections).

Nice idea, this way, please:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/motion.html

conc. 'enviroments' ... I guess, somewhere deep, really deep digged into the software

A workaround I do is to turn off the 3D text lighting totally, and build my own lighting setup in Motion.  I will make a new Motion project, copy and paste my lighting Group to it and save it as a template.  I can then copy and paste from my template project, to any project I'm working in.  Not overly easy, but a workaround.

You need Motion to do this, it's "not allowed" in FCPX (there's no way to add images to the source wells).

How you pull this off:  Add Layer > Finish > Custom Specular layer. You get a layer panel that looks like this:

If you click on Specular Color > From Surface, you can select:

Drop your "environment image" into the source well. In all likelihood, the effect will be "overexposed". To counter that, you also need to select Intensity Image and dial down the disclosure triangle:

and add the SAME image to the source well. Adjust the White and Black Levels to get a balanced "reflection".

On top of all that, it is almost assured that you will want to adjust the placement of the environment image. To do that you will have to dial down the "Placement" property disclosure triangles and adjust the Scale and X,Y Position (and they should all match in all locations the same image is used.

Here is the entire Custom Specular layer used for the beach image above:

(Notice that the Intensity is cranked up to about 1000% and how all the parameters for the added images are matched).

For best results:

1) Placement should always be independent.

2) The image you use as an environment should be placed in a 2D Fixed Resolution Group (I've seen some get away with 3D Flattened... but my recommendation is 2DFR in all cases).

3) The Scale parameters (inside 3D Text settings) should be dialed down and have the "Scale With Font Size" option turned off! (it's on by default so you have to do this every d@*# time.) When you turn it off you'll notice the scale jumps by quite a bit - scale back down to the 100% range (give or take).

You can still use Environmental lighting style but the effect is not the same when Custom Specular is involved.  You do not have to change the Environment > Type from Field. You can still use Intensity, Contrast and Saturation options with the Custom Specular (although the saturation will never go to grayscale in this case.) If you want grayscale/monochrome, add the Hue/Saturation filter to the original image.

This technique is a workaround and it will not work correctly for replicated shapes of "revolution" (like a sphere) where an actual environment will work. It would be nice (and it is on my wishlist for Motion) if Apple would add the capability to add 3D environment (equirectangular projection) images (which can be taken with an iPhone with an app like 360).

not exactly 'enviroments', but to apply custom 'projections of materials', a while ago I published this free plugin:

http://www.fcp.co/forum/text-titles/25174-free-texture-to-title-title-plugin

btw: excellent tutorial, again, fox!!