New Features Everyone is familiar with the typical credits you see at the end of movies or TV programs, typically just a set of text lines scrolling smoothly up, or down or sideways across the screen. Xara 3D Maker 7 can do this of course, but it can also animate the text in the Z axis in or out of the screen. The text is also rendered in 3D - so you can adjust all the typical Xara 3D attributes, such as extrude depth, the bevel type, the colors etc. There are 2 new animation types. Click the 'Animation' tab on the right side to see the animations controls. The two new options in the drop down list are 'scroll' and 'scroll in/out. The simplest of these is 'scroll'. This scrolls a series of text lines up/down, left or right, or in or out of the screen in a continuous fashion. The second new, and more complex, animation option is called 'scroll in/out' and this splits the animation into two parts so you can have text come in from one direction and go out in another. For example it could start scrolling down the screen, pause in the center and then rush away into the distance (Z axis). So the 'scroll' always moves in the same direction, and the 'scroll in/out' has the option of independent directions for the 'in' part and the 'out' part. Importantly in both cases you can control the speed of the animation, the acceleration or deceleration, and the gap between the lines of text. This is a simple continuous scroll coming out of the screen. The font is Tahoma and it has a simple extrude with no bevel. The text color is white with 2 blue lights shining from the back onto the sides of the text. There's one white light pointing at the front of the text, so it has a white face. This is what it looks like in Xara 3D:   Tip: The timeline is a set of controls above the main window. If you can't see this you can turn it on using the menu Window -> Time Line. It has a thumb slider control (hardly visible in the above screen shot), but you can grab the slider and drag this to rapidly move to any position in the animation sequence. © Xara Group 2011