Glyph Resolve
After tribe.ai
A string is not a block, it is a list of glyphs. Give each one a home, a seat and a place in the queue, and a single 0..1 driver buys you every text effect worth having.
Parameters ▾
Scatter
Drive
Setting
Every glyph has a home and a seat. Resolve slides between them; stagger offsets each glyph's start along the string.
What it actually does
- Each glyph carries a reading position and a scattered seat. One driver slides between them.
- The stagger is what makes it feel like settling rather than snapping: the same driver, offset along the string, so the sentence arrives left to right.
- Colour and scale ride the same driver, so an unresolved glyph reads as "not yet arrived" rather than as a differently styled glyph.
- Four scatter modes over the same layout — orbit, radial, drift, column — showing that the seat function is the only thing that changes between wildly different effects.
What the rebuild taught
- All the difficulty is in the layout pass, not the animation. Measure, place, emit a flat addressable list; the rest is a lerp.
- Seat glyphs by the golden angle so neighbouring characters never scatter to neighbouring places, which would read as a smear rather than a field.
- Measure spaces for advance but never emit them, or you end up animating invisible items and the stagger goes uneven.
Rebuild
Split out of Orbital Field so the type behaviour could be studied without a globe competing for attention. The text is editable in the panel, which makes it a usable sketchpad rather than a fixed demo.
Primitives
Glyph fieldText broken into individually addressable characters with a home and an away position.
Depth cueAlpha, scale or weight standing in for lighting. Cheap, flat, and more legible than shading.