Graphics

Has anyone had any issues with certain fonts turning black for no reason?

I've had this happen a lot recently, where a font used more than once in the same scene will randomly turn black on just one of the instances being used.

For example, I've got a Lottery fullscreen that has the same font being used for every lottery number shown. Last night my producer was entering the numbers in ENPS and in the preview just one of the numbers was showing black. I checked the scene on air and it was white. Then I checked the scene on my Studio box and that one number was indeed black. I checked the scene again on air and it changed it to black.

There's no rhyme or reason for this. It happened again when I was building a scene on a Designer box. I had a text object that started as white, then I made the Alpha 0 because it's an object that is being used for scripting. I had to look at that object again so I made the Alpha 100 and it was black.

In both cases I never touched the scene font tab, let alone that particular font.

What is your version ?

#XPression

Happening for me as well. Using Prime v4.1.

#XPression

We're on version 4.x I believe. I'm not at the station until later, so I don't know the exact version number, but we are on the newest major version.

Glad I'm not the only one experiencing this, either.

#XPression

I just had this happen to me for the first time yesterday. I couldn't figure out how to change it back to white it. I just copied and pasted in a similar text object from another scene to replace it.

I believe we're on XPression Studio 4.1

#XPression

That was my solution, too. I copied an object from the same scene and moved into place. The real problem is if you have key frames on an animation controller and have to rebuild that part, too. Luckily in this case my animation controller was applied to a group of text objects so it was no big deal. And, if it has already hit air that way it's too late.

#XPression

This has also happened to me several times with one particular project in Xpression Studio 3.2. Font turns black while editing text in a scene in layout mode. Font is also black in other scenes that I have not edited, and remains black when scenes are put online. My solution is to exit the program, and after restarting and reopening the project, the font is back to normal. If I don't try to edit the text again, the font behaves.

#XPression

I'll have to try exiting and restarting it next time, but I find it odd that it would show up like that in the ENPS MOS plugin also.

#XPression

Same here. The first project I had ever created caused the text to go black so I just started a new one. Yesterday a scene within a crawl turned black so I had to duplicate a similar scene to replace it.

V4.1 Build 2117

#XPression

Try to look if Z-scale is not to 0...

I had problem on some object with that...

#XPression

Oh, setting the Z-scale to 0 does turn the text black. Thanks for the heads up!

#XPression

That's gotta be something that can be fixed. All of my text layers are at Z scale 0.

Text layers are supposed to be on top of everything, do I really need to change every scene to ensure this doesn't happen randomly?

#XPression

Nothing to do... Just wait an update I think...

#XPression

Hi David,

In my honest opinion, I prefer to choose the Z-position of my text-objects. Otherwise I couldn't use masking or other effects where text is being revealed in some sort. Don't forget we're working in a 3D-environment now, even if the output is just 2D.

So I find it better practice to use Z-layering when creating a scene.

Now by default the Text-Rendering option is set to Text on Top. But if you put many layers on the same layer as the text, sometimes it could occur that text-objects aren't been displayed properly.

I can understand that you don't want to change all of your text-layers in your scene, but if you're using a background in your scene, try setting that to z-position -1 and see if the issue still occurs?

Best regards,

Kenneth

#XPression

Yeah, I know what you mean about masks for text and what-not, but the scenes I've built that I needed that, I changed the text object to Normal, but I never even thought about it for other scenes. It wouldn't hurt to go through and bump all the text up a little in Z space.

Thanks all :)

#XPression

Just wanted to update everyone in this thread.

The z-scale defaulting to 0 has been fixed in XPression 4.3 2248. At this time, it is unlikely a 4.3 version of XPression will be formally QA'd and released, but this fix will be in version 5, which will be released this summer.

#XPression

Make sure your text object Z-scale is set to 1.

#XPression

This bug is also fixed in the current QA release of XPression 5.0 2312. The z-scale value will not intermittently reset itself to 0 when loading an xpf file.

#XPression