After Effects Tutorial: Text Animations

okay here we go focus speed I am speed hello everyone and welcome back to a new tutorial before we start I just want to mention that this video is sponsored by envato elements and Bato provides over 1 million digital assets such as graphic elements stock footage fonts music and much more so if you are interested I have provided a link down below which will take you to their websites and of course if you do decide to register I get to earn a commission now in today's tutorial we're gonna be taking a look at text animations and text layers in general the animations that you saw at the beginning of this video we're all created using different kinds of techniques that we're gonna be going through in this tutorial starting from masking out individual letters so we can animate them separately using solid layers as mattes to reveal our text layers using pre-made animations that come with After Effects creating a path so we can animate our text to move along that path playing around with the text properties such as tracking and line spacing and finally we're gonna take a look at two more specific animations revealing text using the stroke effect to achieve the handwriting animation and also revealing text using shape layers now to save you some time I've created timestamps for each part of this tutorial just in case you're interested in one specific type of animation by the way the music that you're listening to is from a royalty-free music channel that me and a friend of mine set up so if you're looking for some music to use in your videos make sure to check it out at CMC beats okay so with all that said let's now move on to After Effects alright guys here we are now in After Effects so we're gonna start off by creating a new composition by going up to composition new composition let's name it text masking let's leave it at 1080p frame 8 of 30 seems fine and then we got the duration of 300 frames let's click OK now let's go ahead and create a new solid by going up to layer new solid its name this BG for background and hit OK next up click on the text tool or you can hold down ctrl T to bring it up and then just click and drag speed the font that I use for this one is Gotham Pro and as - black italic and you can also use this button down here to make it even more italic but I'll show you what I like to do instead you can see that the Anchor Point is not centered which in this case we don't need it centered but I'm gonna show you real quick how you can do that go up to the Anchor Point tool or you can click Y on the keyboard as a shortcut and then click and hold down ctrl to snap it to the center you can also snap it to each of these points and one more thing you can do is let's bring it over here which I like to use most of the time is click ctrl alt home now what I mentioned before about the italic thing you can go ahead and click on the drop down here and bring the text properties up and go on to animate and then just click on skew and this allows you to skew the text I basically make it more italic and in this case it works for us because we want that like speedy kind of look to the font and also you can tweak the orientation but we don't need in this case one more thing I wanted to do is write them out a little bit and now we can go ahead and animate this text coming in from left to right let's click p on the keyboard to bring up the position and then set a keyframe move forward to maybe frame 20 and by the way you can see the frames here but you can control click to switch between seconds minutes and also to frames well let's set a keyframe to frame 20 one more shortcut I want to show you is page up and page down which allows you to move forward and backwards by one frame you can also hold down shift which allows you to move forward or backwards by 10 frames and one more tip I want to give you is whenever you know the final location of a certain text or a certain layer just go to the final frame set a keyframe there and then go back to the beginning and move it over to where you want it to come from just so that it saves you some time so let's bring it over here to suicide go over to maybe frame 30 click and on the keyboard which allows you to bring the work area and and then click 0 to Ram preview it so not the most exciting motion but what we can do to make it better is select both of these keyframes and then right click keyframe assistant easy ease or you can press f9 as a shortcut and then now we can go ahead and preview it again but we can make it even better by right-clicking again go to keyframe velocity and this brings up the menu which allows us to change the incoming velocity and the outgoing velocity so let's make that 75% for both and now if we preview it one more time we have this much better looking motion ok so now we can go ahead and separate each of these letters so they can come in individually so let's go ahead and duplicate this four times control D on the keyboard and we can go ahead and name them according to each letter by the way I'm clicking return on the keyboard to enable the name change so click on the pen tool up here you can also see the G pop-up which is a shortcut it's a good thing to know all these shortcuts of course you don't need them but if you do know them they will save you a lot of time so let's go ahead and mask the S letter do the same thing for the P letter once we've gone ahead and masked each of them out what we can do now is offset them by some frames so that they come in at different times say D comes in first so we're gonna go ahead and just offset e for one frame and then the other eat for another frame and then so on and so forth see what we have so you can see what that does just by offsetting them by one frame but I'm thinking we should just offset them by two frames instead and then maybe the last one by three frames to have some more randomness to it so it's a pretty good motion but what would help it pop even more is if we enabled motion blur on them let's go ahead and click on the S letter hold down shift click on D to select them all and then turn on the motion blur and also turn on the motion blur for the comp itself so now if we preview it it's got this much more powerful look to it by the way if you want to adjust the intensity of the motion blur you can go ahead and click the composition that you're working on and then go up to composition settings Advanced tab and then you can see the shutter angle here so if we increase this you can see what that does since we have preview enabled here so if I turn it down to zero there's no motion blur a default being counted at 80 if you want to go overboard you can just set it to 400 and also one more thing you can see here is the samples per frame so if you happen to have a lot of motion blur you should crank this up to maybe like 32 or 40 depending on how much motion blur you have so let's set this to 30 and hit OK now let's give that one more preview so it's a pretty smooth pretty good looking motion but one more thing I did in the animation that you saw the beginning of this video is that I added some trails to each letters the way I did that is by duplicating all these letters and let's go ahead and pre compose them so layer pre compose or ctrl shift C can type in Speed trail hit OK bring this down at the bottom and just offset this completely by one frame and then click T on the keyboard to bring up the opacity and just bring this down to maybe like 30 percent and now you can see before and after you can actually duplicate it one more time set it by one more frame and maybe set it to 15% so it's not as visible and now one last preview and we got this okay so that was it for this type of animation now let's move on to the next one next on the list is revealing text using solids as Matt let's go ahead and create a new solid by going up to layer new solid nameless matte hit okay then let's click ctrl T to bring up the text tool as I told you before click and drag maybe type in reveal set the phone's back to Gotham maybe make it Gotham book ctrl alt home to Center the anchor point and then one more shortcut is that you can click control home to Center every layer to the composition itself now let's select the matte solid and go up to the rectangle tool and also by clicking Q you can toggle between the different shapes but for now we want the rectangle tool so with a matte layer selected let's draw a shape roughly around the text so maybe something like that and now we're gonna bring the matte layer above the reveal layer of course now we can't see it because the mask is on top of it but by clicking f4 to toggle the switches we can set the matte of this reveal text to alpha matte so everywhere the matte is that's where the text is gonna be visible click p on the keyboard to bring up the position again set a keyframe go forward by 15 frames set the final keyframe and then go back and now let's just bring this up smooth out these keyframes just like we did before maybe let's bring this frame up you can press f4 again turn on the motion blur let me get this moving on we're gonna take a look at text animations that come with After Effects and let me tell you there are some pretty cheesy animations that I don't think you will ever get to use but there are also some pretty sweet-looking ones which i think will be pretty useful in order to access these pre-made animations we have to bring up the effects and presets tab by going up to window effects and presets and we can see there on the right side and then go down to animation presets text and here we have all the text animations that are pre-made which you can just simply drag and drop to the text animation of course they are categorized so we got 3d text and I made an animate out these are the ones that I usually use so let's go ahead and look at those bring them down there's some pretty good ones here but the ones that I use most of the time is this one random fade up drag and drop it to the text by the way you can click you on the keyboard to bring up all the keyframes it's simply two keyframes going from 0% to 100% so let's click be at the start and end at the end to set up the work area accordingly and then click 0 on the keyboard to preview that and of course you can speed it up you can smooth it out one thing to keep in mind is that wherever your current time indicator is that's where the starting keyframe is gonna be next up most useful would be the typewriter effects let's click and drag that down and the cool thing about it is you can just double click on the text and just change it to whatever you have like gonna be cool it'll automatically update the animation for you now of course as I said it before there's a bunch of different types of animations here which would take us a long time if we went through them one by one but be my guess and just play around with them and it might end up saving you a lot of time in your animations okay so next up we're gonna take a look at paths for your text layers and what we're going to do is select the text and then go up to the pen tool and this is very important you have to use your pen tool on your text layer itself so let's just make a path here something like a rollercoaster so it goes up and then it goes down and then goes off the frame like so and then once we set up the mask we can go ahead and click down on the layer go down to text and then you can see here it says path options bring that down and you have the option to choose the mass you just created and automatically you can see it all sets it up for you but of course you do have a few options here to play around with to make the animation the way that you want first off we have the reverse path which we can turn on and you can see what that does basically just flips it upside down moving on we have perpendicular to path if you have it on they orient towards the path but if we have it on off they just sit straight for now let's just leave it it on next up we have force alignment and if we turn that on let's just click S on the keyboard and scale it down so we can see it so what happens is it just spreads out the text so it fills the entire path for this one we don't want that so let's go back to the text go back to the path options and just turn off the force alignment and then we have the first margin and the last margin which are the only two properties that we can use to animate this text to move along the path so let's select the text maybe scale it back up again and set a keyframe on the first margin and then just move it back hold down shift by the way to speed up the scrolling of the value and just bring it over here at the side and then move forward by maybe like 40 frames and then bring it all the way back to the right side and again let's select the keyframes right click keyframe assistant easy ease and then right-click them again to adjust the velocity set that to 75% let's click n again on the keyboard and press 0 to preview it now of course this looks way too quick so let's just bring this over drag this over preview it again now of course we can't really see the rollercoaster text up until this point so let's click B again let's have the animation start there and have it end here turn on the motion blur for the comp and for the layer itself and give it one last preview now the motion blur is pretty intense as you can see but it actually looks pretty sick ok so that was it for this part let's move on to the next one so I set up a new composition here just to save us some time and before we move on to the text properties which is the next topic of this tutorial I just want to mention something real quick regarding the character tab so every value that you see you and you can adjust you can actually animate using the text properties so say you want to have your texts come from this to this well you can animate that or say for example you have two lines of text and you want to like adjust the gap between the lines well you can do that and it's actually pretty easy so first off let's start off with a source text and you can click on the stopwatch move forward some frames and then change the text to something different different net and if we scroll through time you can see that as soon as we hit the stopwatch or the key frame that's when the text actually changes so say for example you have multiple text layers popping up throughout time instead of just having like multiple text layers duplicating them adjusting the length and everything you can actually just delete these and have all of that in one single text layer but for now let's turn that off and leave it as is so we can check out the animate button so as I mentioned before every value that you see at the character tab can actually be animated and you can all find them in this tab so you got anchor point position scale skew which we checked out before rotation you got fill color and all these different values throw color as well same thing you got stroke width which of course it actually adjust over here set the color of the stroke to maybe something like red but of course you can only adjust it here but if you use this stroke width let's start off demonstrating that set a keyframe here move forward just animate it you can see what happens and of course you have this range selector which comes with every animator that you create so you can select what part of your text you want to be affected by this value okay so now if you don't want that animator you can just go ahead and delete it let's go back to animate you got some more interesting values here you got tracking line spacing as I mentioned before so let's go ahead and click on tracking and let's go ahead and turn off the stroke color you have the animate line spacing so let's go ahead and type in some more text 2nd line you got line spacing which goes up and down and it also allows you to move left and right now let's lead that as well and for the sake of this tutorial I'm not gonna go through all of them but just for demonstration I'm gonna go ahead and show you something about the scale property so let's click on that and let's just animate the scale real quick here going from 0 to 100 and if we zoom in here you can see these points which are basically anchor points for each individual letter so what that means is they're gonna scale up or scale down around that point so say for example you want to adjust that anchor point for each of these letters you can go up to animate anchor point and then you can just move them accordingly so so now they're all scaling up from the center basically you have endless possibilities using combinations of these animations for your text layers ok moving on we're gonna take a look at a pretty popular effect which I like to call the handwriting effect so I have some text here and I'm using this font called Luna which is a pretty cute looking font and before we go ahead and add the stroke effect which is gonna allow us to do the handwriting animation we're gonna go ahead and use the pen tool to draw over the letters so that we can use that mask to actually generate our letters afterwards so let's click on the pen tool I move closer here zoom in just start drawing through the letters and make sure you're roughly in the middle and also keep in mind that wherever you start your mask from that's the way it's gonna be animated and then moving on with the other letters okay so once we have the mask set up we're gonna go ahead and add the stroke effect so we can move on to the animation and we're gonna do that by going up to effect generate stroke and by the way quick mention you can actually use the video co-pilots FX console plug-in which is completely free and that allows you to use control space and then just type in whatever you fact you want just so that you don't have to actually go up to effect or use the effects and presets which is pretty annoying sometime now before we do anything else let's make sure we have all masks checked and then the next step is to put the painting style on reveal original image so what this does the text is gonna be revealed by the stroke effect itself let's just increase it to the point where it's okay for us actually I don't want the dot of the eye to pop up because we're gonna add that detail later so once we have the brush size according to the text we can now see the entire text what we're gonna do next is animate the end value now if we scroll through the animation you can actually see some errors here like say for example in this part this part here is not supposed to be shown but then again it's not really a problem if your animation is a pretty quick because the human eye will not even be able to notice it so let's go ahead and go down to 0 set a keyframe for the end and then move over to frame 20 go all the way over to 100% and also there's another error here so let's increase the brush size just a little bit now this might be just a bit too fast so let's bring it bring the keyframe a bit over also smooth it out okay so once we have that let's go ahead and duplicate this smile layer delete the stroke effect of hit M on the keyboard selected masks and also delete those and let's zoom in and just mask around this dot on top of the eye letter and what we're gonna do is after everything is typed in let's just animate the mask from off to on you can do that by clicking M to bring up the mask path set a keyframe move over by like five frames and then just adjust the mask like so okay so there you go on other cool animation that you can do pretty quickly and pretty simply as well and lastly let's check out how we can use shape layers to reveal our text and this is actually pretty similar to what we did before with a solid layer reveal so let's go ahead and create a new shape layer by going up to layer new shape layer and while having the shape layer selected we're gonna go ahead and start drawing on top of the H so click and then click again down here by the way let's control Z and before you click make sure you hold shift cuz this is what happens even if I click here while holding shift it actually snaps it vertically so that helps you a lot because you don't have like a non straight line now let's turn these two layers off for a second so we can see how the shape layer looks and for now this is not actually what we want so what we're gonna do is go down to the shape layer contents and down here you can find the path the stroke fill transform shape as well but we're gonna go ahead and delete the fill since we don't eat it for now and go down to the stroke and then you can see here it says stroke width we're just gonna turn that down a lot and now we can actually turn back the high text layer and in fact let's control space type in fill make it a different color just so we can see it better and now what we're gonna do is adjust the stroke width so that it fits with the left side of the H letter and then what we see here is line cap you can turn that to a round cap and it actually matches our font pretty well cuz we got this Gotham rounded font the shape layer with a round cap gives us this rounded edge and now we can press G on the keyboard to bring the points up again just like both of those move them over we don't want to hit this middle line cuz we're gonna create another shape layer for that so let's leave it at that maybe bring it up a bit or just scale it down like that and now what we're gonna do is go over to add and then there's this option here it says trim paths so what this allows us to do is actually trim these paths and we're gonna go ahead and animate this so let's set a keyframe at the start move forward by maybe one two three four five and then bring it all the way back to 100% and now what we're gonna do is instead of having these lines on the same shape layer which is gonna give us this result where everything is gonna be trimmed at the same time we're gonna create different shape layers for different lines so let's duplicate this and actually just leave it as is now press gene turn off this second shape layer and just adjust this other one that we created sort of like that doesn't have to be perfect now let's go down to the contents and for this one we actually want the stroke to be buttcap because the middle line is straight and doesn't have those round edges but let's adjust it like so now we did create the keyframes before so we don't really have to adjust them but as you can see we actually flipped them so let's just just correct that real quick again you don't have to be perfect because we're gonna be turning this into a map later on so we can use it with a text layer itself let's now go ahead and turn the first shape layer back on so we can see it and what we're gonna do is offset the second shape layer so that it actually matches with the timing of the first one so there you go so as soon as it hits there we want it to be in sync and then once this middle line hits the wall of the right side that's where we'll have the other line come in so let's duplicate this shape layer again move it on top pull down shift and then press the right arrow key which will help you move it faster pretty much you have the animation done but we're gonna scoot it over just a bit too again match it with the timing now let's move on to the I letter let's duplicate the first shape layer again and it's moving on top you can click P on the keyboard and then just bring it over and for this one we actually need to adjust the shape so press G on the keyboard click on the point and you can actually hold down shift so it snaps vertically or horizontally see how the animation looks again and for the I letter we're actually gonna have it start from the bottom so you can either invert the points or what we can do is go down to the contents trim paths and instead of animating the end we can animate the start so let's go to the last keyframe turn the stopwatch off turn on the stopwatch for the start and then go back to the beginning and just go all the way up to 100% preview that there it is now we're gonna scoot this over again just so that it lines up with the timing of the H a bit like that maybe make some more room even smooth these out right click keyframe assistant easy ease and let's actually go ahead and give this a quick preview now it's not the most fascinating motion but for the sake of this tutorial we'll just run with it now before we go ahead and pre compose these shape layers one more detail I want to add is by duplicating this high layer going up to the rectangle tool and masking out the dot and doing the same thing for this first layer as well but for the first one let's just set it to subtract so that the highlighter on top is on its own and now remember when I told you about the Anchor Point well this is where we get to use it properly so click on the anger tool and then bring it at the middle of this point and now when we hit S on the keyboard for the scale you can see how it scales up around that point set a keyframe and let's do it for like one two three four five six seven and let's set a keyframe again you can click this arrow to jump between the keyframes and then hold down shift and drag to snap the layer at this point and now we can just set the scale to zero on the first frame and smooth them out real quick keyframe assistant easy ease keyframe us keyframe velocity sorry 75 percent again not the best motion I've created in my life let's now move on to pre composing these shape layers layer pre compose hit OK and now what we can do is bring this on top of the text layer and set the text layer as an alpha matte see what happens now all right guys so we're finally done with the last part of this tutorial as well of course you can go ahead and tweak the key frames together better and smoother result but for now we'll just leave it at that and move on to the outro of this video alright guys that was it for this tutorial thank you for watching and being patient all the way through there might be some more tutorials in my channel that could interest you as well so be sure to check those out if you have any questions or tutorial suggestions feel free to leave a comment down below also if you want to follow me on social media here you go if this video was helpful to you in any way then consider subscribing and turning on the bell right next to it to be notified whenever a new video comes out thank you once again for watching and I'll see you next time peace [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Broken

Views: 72,641

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Id: GdLphYwKcnk

Length: 26min 25sec (1585 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 05 2019