Creatively Using Text Animators in After Effects

[Music] hey what's up this is Kyle Hamrick with school of motion in this tutorial we're gonna be talking about a feature that you probably use all the time but may have never really explored the After Effects text animator it's actually one of my favorite features and after this maybe it'll be yours too you can actually use the text animator to create all kinds of cool non text motion design ii stuff which could otherwise take tons of layers or complicated expressions to build you can often create things like this on a single layer with just a couple of keyframes once you really understand how this Tool Works you'll be much more efficient when you do need to animate actual text there's a free project file included with the article on school of motion comm but most of the examples we'll be working through are things we'll just be able to build from scratch let's check it out and see what we can do with this really powerful tool that you might have totally overlooked I'm guessing that a lot of people have their first experience with the text animator by typing out some words and then they dive into these presets over here they look at a couple they apply one and it's okay but it's kind of lame and weird and you know maybe you just assume that it's kind of an outdated tool or something right or maybe you get ambitious and start looking into the properties but they just seem confusing and they're different than everything else just kind of give up there too but you still needed to get your titles done so you just broke them all up into individual words or letters and maybe just use the transform properties to bring them in so pretty soon you've got like 20 layers here for this basic title and you've got like 50 titles to do so that's a mess too right so let's stop for just a second and talk about what text on a computer actually is it's just a bunch of vector shapes right these just happen to be vector shapes that we have collectively given meaning to once you stop viewing the text animator as a way just to bring on words and understand what it's actually doing you'll realize it's a really awesome procedural effector based animator for vector shapes I know what the heck is he talking right let's dive in and I'll show you as you can see I've changed my layout a little bit when you twirl a text layer open all the way you end up needing quite a bit of vertical space so this is my timeline over here just making so I can see a lot of height this next portion is going to be a little bit technical I'm just gonna explain how all the different parts of the text animator work I think it's important for us to understand the tool so that then we can start exploring and have some fun with it so I'm gonna start off by right-clicking new text there's a couple other ways that you can create this I like doing it this way because it'll be centered in the composition which is gonna be good for this example I'm just going to hit my period key several times until I've kind of filled up the width of the screen I find this to be a very helpful way to help understand how these various properties and tools are working in here because you're not focusing on this being words you can just view it as abstract shapes for the purposes of this demonstration I'm going to go ahead and control the duplicate this layer and then I'm gonna set the bottom one to be a very low opacity I'm going to choose 10 and this way we'll sort of be able to see where we came from that'll make sense in a minute on my top layer I'll twirl this open and every text layer has this little animate flyout which is how you access the text animators I'm gonna choose animate position and now this is giving us a position property which in this case is per character and I can choose to change these things from their default value see how that copy back here is still sitting at its default and then I've changed each of these to minus 300 on Y now if we twirl open this range selector it gives us some options about which portions of this thing we want to be affecting by default it's set to percentage and so let's say we want the first 20% to be normal and the last 20% to also be normal so we're currently affecting the region from 20% to 80% if you have this highlighted you can actually see these start and end values and you can kind of push it through when you're doing this with words you'll be able to see this if you're animating opacity or something this is each character fading on because you've changed it from its default opacity a hundred to zero and so when you're changing it back to the default they're fading into view I'm going to set this back to 20 and then we'll take a second to explore this offset value so I've defined a range within here that's going to be affected an offset lets you offset where that's happening okay but the same amount of characters are still going to be changed even though you can actually push this off the edges I'm going to go ahead and undo to reset that to zero under the Advanced section is where you actually get a lot of the power in this text animator now the first thing I'm going to do is change the units from percentage to index which means the actual character count in this case as you can see right here it's based on characters but you can also choose words or lines and now it's actually counting the first one is 0 by the way counting up to let's go ahead and set these two whole numbers I'm going to bump them up a little bit here so let's set this from 10 to 20 and you'll see it's kind of taking this nice middle section everything else is still the default and then from character 10 to character 20 is being affected by whatever property or properties I've given it here the next thing on the list is this mode setting which is very similar to the way that mode works on masks you have adds subtract intersect etc right now I'm adding this change but if I wanted all the characters to be changed except the reach and I had chosen I could set this to subtract and now you'll see that's exactly what's happening these have all been changed these are the default value and these have all been changed I'm going to go ahead and undo that next we have an amount property which actually lets you change even go negative here how much of this change is actually happening so you could just set a region to be changed and without animating the start and end values at all you could animate this property to push the things into whatever effected state you wanted these next couple properties are the ones that are probably the most mysterious the default shape is square and as the name implies this is actually telling you what shape after if X is using to apply the change that you have given it if you look closely here you can see this is essentially pushing a square through this line I'm going to change this to ramp up and now we have several characters at the default value and then it's slowly ramping up to be in that affected state that we've given it if we set this to ramp down it's the inverse of that so it's affected and then ramping down back to the default value I find these shapes to be very helpful when you're animating text on and you want a smoother transition so you're not waiting for each previous character to finish doing whatever it's doing before the next one starts animating so using ramp up or ramp down and then animating the offset property like this is how you can get these really smooth text transitions so these next couple shapes here again are extremely mysterious when you're trying to do this with words but if you see it like this it's actually quite clear what's happening in this case there's a triangle shape being kind of run through the line of dots right again if we push around this offset value you can see what's happening it's animating up to the property and back down if we widen this out it'll just make it a bigger wider triangle round is essentially the same thing it's just pushing a round shape through here and then smooth is that same shape but eased and again now that we're looking at this with these abstract shapes I hope you're already seeing how useful this could be for all kinds of cool motion designing things that don't have anything to do with text so I'm gonna go ahead and undo that again and I'm going to set this back to one of the ramps as you can see over here we have a constant value a sudden change this is constantly changing at one rate here and then it suddenly stops changing and is again a static value does that sound familiar that's exactly what linear keyframes are if you want your animations to be smoother you just ease those keyframes right so if you want this change from one value to an affected value to be smoother you can ease it right here eze hi is kind of this top part in this example where it's easing into that change ease low is easing out of the default value in this example so see if you push these a bit you can get this nice s-curve and while this is kind of abstract this is what's happening when you're using these to animate on by opacity or rotation or something like that again we could push around the offset value here and you can see some really cool possibilities you could change the start and end value to decide how long it takes for this change to be happening over what span of your line lastly we have this randomized value which just randomizes the order in which these things are happening you can always add another selector if you'd like let's add another range selector just to explore what happens here so by default it seems like it's cancelling out the other one and it is at the moment because we need to set some things I'm gonna go ahead and set this to index I'm gonna crank this up to be you know somewhere around here let's make it a full value and then let's make this say 22 so this is the range that this range selector is now affecting and you can see it's overriding that previous one I could set this to subtract if I wanted to and now it's subtracting what this change is doing so it's setting this portion back to its default value and totally ignoring what we've done with the other animator obviously if we were to set this to a more smooth sort of change maybe widen this out of it see how you can create some really interesting stuff here now I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of this range selector and we're gonna take a look at the wiggly selector so ad selector just to point this out there's also an expression selector which I'm going to save for another day because that's a whole other can of worms Wiggly so what the wiggly selector does if it's all by itself it's one of these property driven Wiggles directly within After Effects if I do a ram preview here you can see it's actually wiggling each of these characters randomly by the amount that I had chosen and by the opposite of that amount so every one of these dots is wiggling up to 300 pixels in Y both up and down we can of course change a lot of these properties you can change how this interacts with other selectors that might be on the layer again whether it's based on characters words lines you can change the wiggles per second I find correlation to be quite interesting if you turn the correlation way up these will start wiggling a lot more in unison and you can actually create some really cool wiggly line based things where they actually stick together as a group right I actually like to set Wiggles per second to zero and then actually animate either the temporal or spatial phase because I think that gives you a little bit more control over what's happening but look how we can get this nice smooth fluid motion in this line of dots here pretty cool right we're obviously doing this with dots right now but just imagine that any shape that you could put into a font file is something that you could animate like this the cool thing about Wiggly selectors is they can of course be combined with other types of selectors I'm going to turn this range selector back on and get some really interesting results so the range selector is kind of holding this first portion of the line at the default values and then the wiggly selector is only able to wiggle that later portion of this so if I allowed those Wiggles per second to go or I can be animating this value check that out I can have this really cool Wiggly motion but still keep one side pin down for this next part I'm going to go ahead and delete the wiggly selector and just to point this out you can actually create multiple animators which is why this is called animator one you can of course always change the name if you like but as long as you don't have this selected you can come back up here and animate something different like rotation and you can have a whole separate animator with its own set of properties and changes and do whatever you like and that will of course interact with this in different ways depending on what you do so to this animator I'm going to add property and then I'm also gonna have these dots scale up see what's happening here again we've got our default value 100% scale and then it's scaling way up to four hundred and forty nine percent I think scale is the best way to demonstrate the thing I'm about to show you which is up here under this more options each of these characters has its own anchor point and that's because the anchor point grouping is set to character you could choose word line or all if you wanted to so each chunk of this text whatever you want that to be is going to have its own anchor point around which does transform moves you can change the position of that anchor point right here under this grouping alignment so if I wanted these to be scaling not from the bottom which is what they're doing but more from the middle you can just change this value here and actually have these be scaling from the middle instead see if I reset this position to zero that might be a little clearer there's grouping alignment at zero and they're all scaling from the baseline here's grouping alignment just eyeballed to the middle as you probably know from doing other animation where your anchor points it's has a huge influence on how things look so if you're doing a rotation in one of these be very mindful about where your anchor point is placed per character or per word or whatever because that'll have a big impact on how your text animation looks now there's a drop down here to override how the fill and Stroke display I've never found a lot of use for this personally but it's here if you want it I think this next setting is very interesting inter character blending to be able to show this I'm going to change the color of these characters real quick you actually have access to most of the blending modes right here and you can choose what happens when characters overlap one another in this case I chose add so you can see as they overlap they're adding to each other you can create some really interesting effects by doing this so hopefully talking through these properties like this has given you a much better understanding of how they work now we're going to jump into a couple specific examples and see these in action first we're going to use this same dot setup to create a tapered stroke that can follow a path a lot of people ask how to do a tapered stroke and After Effects and it's actually been here since the mid-2000s they just didn't know where to look so I'm gonna select my text layer you can see I'm using azo sans which is available from Typekit now Adobe fonts but you can use any type face with a round period it'll work the same your numbers might just be a little different than mine I'm going to set my font size way up to about 500 here and then I'm going to condense the tracking way into the negatives until you can see these converge into a solid line eventually perfect then just for fun instead of boring old white let's set this to be maybe the yellow from the school emotion logo I'm going to open this up animate scale and then if I set this to zero the whole thing will disappear that's because the entire range is currently being affected meaning the whole thing is being set to zero right so let's open up advanced and if we set the shape to ramped up now we have regular size ramping down to zero perfect ramping up to zero technically obviously we have a little bit of cleanup to do here let's fix this grouping alignment I'm going to zoom in a little bit so we can see better and if we just kind of eyeball this to about minus six point three you can see that looks pretty centered there is a little bit of an issue here with some separation I'm not gonna worry about it for this example because I'm gonna be adding some effects that will essentially erase that if you're using this clean then you'll probably want to just add some more dots compress your tracking add some more dots compress your tracking just tinker with it until it looks perfect I think this is a pretty good looking taper but we could use these eases right here to kind of give it a little bit more of a teardrop shape which i think is a little more interesting maybe just get them both up a little bit like that then you get this nice eased taper looking good I'm gonna zoom out hit G to grab my pen tool let's give this something to do there we go maybe adjust these down a bit more now we have this nice swoopy path for / to follow zoom back in and then there are path options we can now choose mask 1 that we just drew perfect sort of you'll notice the first option right here is reverse path so if you drew your path backwards like I did you can just click that and there we go obviously we're a little bit off the path so you can just adjust your baseline shift to get it in the right spot and we're good now we can adjust either this first or last margin setting to animate our stroke along the path we'll go up a bit and back up off the opposite corner let's see how that looks there we go tapered stroke folks I think we can make that a little more interesting let's see what else we can do for starters these keyframes could probably use a little attention I'm going to hit f9 to easy ease I'm gonna hit my tilde key to make this particular panel full-size let's open up the graph editor I'm gonna bring this one straight down bring this one straight up so that we've got a nice fast start and a fast finish and a little bit slower in the middle let's see how that feels yeah that's a lot more energetic pretty cool so we could certainly be done right now I think that looks great with a little bit of motion blur you'd never see that separation in the tail I've used this just like this plenty of times I think maybe we can do something a little cooler with it though let's select it maybe add a rough and edges effect to give it a little bit more of an organic feel you can see even with the default settings it works pretty well I'm gonna turn up the scale just a bit turn up the border just a bit just kind of eat away at it not quite that much there we go let's see how that looks pretty cool gives it more of a hand-drawn feel almost has kind of a fiery look to it speaking of which let's maybe turn this logo back on I want to go name this animator scale taper and then I'm going to deselect this animator come up here and animate fill color RGB so you can animate the fill color of this stroke but we don't want to do the whole thing of course we just want to do the front I'm gonna go ahead and eyedropper this red color from the logo turn that back off and then if we set the shape to ramp down we can have the front of this little fireball maybe it's a little bit of easing here we can kind of fine-tune that now we have a gradient along a stroke following a path and it's tapered pretty sweet right it's not exactly the same as a cell animated fireball stroke thing but it's pretty close and considering this only has two keyframes and took us just a couple of minutes I'll take it well you can do a ton with dots and lines and letter forms if you want even more options there's an almost infinite supply of ASCII characters Unicode characters custom ornament fonts and dingbats all that so you have tons and tons of different looks and shapes and things like that that you can bring in to use like this if you follow some of the links in the article you'll find some of these characters which I use all the time to make arrows specifically bendy arrows that can follow a very precise path which is a really useful thing so let's tweak these a little bit will compress the tracking and select just the arrow head use the baseline shift to kind of get it down into the right spot it looks good and now we need to give this a path to follow I'll press G from my pen tool as you met a little bit draw a nice curvy path for it to follow zoom back in open this up text path options mask 1 there we go since I've already done some baseline adjustments on individual pieces I'm going to use animate position to just nudge this into place here just because it's called an animator doesn't mean it needs to animate it can just be an adjustment and now I'm gonna use this first margin property again to animate this arrow into place let's push it off screen make a keyframe come up a little bit let's maybe overshoot just a little bit come up a few more frames and ease into place well just easy easy these keyframes for now see how that feels looks great as you can see with just a few simple shapes on the text animator you can do some things that are otherwise really tough to do or sometimes impossible without third-party scripts or plugins next up we're going to be working with this full-screen pattern of dots which I got by just copy pasting that single line down here are my text settings if that's helpful to you but again you can just eyeball this make it work for you I find this really helpful if you need to bring on a pattern like this because it makes it pretty easy to do this entire pattern of dots with one layer and one set of key frames if you figure out how to decipher the mysteries of the expression selector you can even add overshoot and other cool stuff but we're going to be doing something a little different right now which is using this to create a cool abstract pattern so I've got my dots I'm going to animate scale and you can see we need to fix our anchor points here so I'm just gonna eyeball that up in my example it's about minus 9 I'm gonna go ahead and set the scale to zero so they all disappear because again the whole range is being affected we actually don't need this range selector so I'm gonna go ahead and delete it we do need however a wiggly selector there's obviously a few things we need to fix here the first being lock dimensions which will keep these scaling uniformly so already you can see okay that's kind of interesting probably a little fast for my taste so I'm gonna go ahead and turn the Wiggles per second down to 0.5 and then I'm gonna hit tab jump down to correlation and set that to zero just so they're totally random if you wanted them to be in sync with each other set them up I like 85 to 90 so let's preview that and you can see that's kind of cool I think it could be more interesting but it feels like a nice start so here's where the power of this starts coming in this is all one layer so we can very easily add effects to this I'm gonna go ahead and add echo and I'm gonna set the echo time to 0.5 right now you're not gonna see a lot of difference because you have white dots time offset with other white dots so it pretty much looks like the same thing but next we're going to add the set Matt effect by default set Matt is set to itself which is actually what we want here and while you can potentially use effects and masks we actually want this to use the source and leave it set to alpha Channel and then I want to click this little box for invert Matt so what's happening here is the affected version of this layer using echo is actually using the unaffected version of this layer without echo as its own Matt and then inverting that so you're getting a slightly time offset version of the layer matting itself so you get these cool kind of growing bubbles here I think that's pretty cool but there's probably one more thing we could do to clean this up just a little bit we do end up with some edges here just as a remnant of that matting process so I'm gonna go ahead and also add a simple choker and set that to about 1.5 again you can eyeball this just see what works best for you just kind of cleans up those little rings there and now we have this nice abstract bubbly pattern I like that quite a bit but I think there's one more thing we could do to really set this off I'm going to turn that logo back on go ahead and rename this we'll call it scale wiggle and then let's add another animator notice I made sure this one is not selected so I'm going to animate fill color RGB I'm going to eyedropper that yellow from the logo and then open up this range selector I'm going to go ahead and rename this as well I don't want them all to be yellow let's maybe set it to be about 30% of them and then if I set randomize order to on it's just gonna randomize which ones appear yellow perfect I'm actually going to go ahead and command or control D duplicate rename this one red open this up eyedropper the red color and then just set the random seed to something different so it'll also be affecting 30% randomly chosen and it'll be selecting different parts of this than the yellow is close that up turn off the logo make another preview very cool so now we have this great abstract background you can see it would be easy to keep adding other colors right now the colors are stuck to specific circles but if you wanted that to evolve a little bit more you could just animate the offset property or something like that the really cool thing about working like this is since everything's on one layer you could actually select all of it text effects and you could save this as a preset if this for something you were going to use frequently there's one last thing I should probably show you because of course there's an entire dimension we haven't even explored yet you can of course make a text layer 3d like anything else but you can also enable per character 3d so I'm going to go ahead and do that which means that any of these transform properties I choose like rotation will have all three dimensions available and that's pretty cool but not as cool as this if I change my render to the cinema 4d or this actually works with the old raytrace engine as well the cinema 4d render enables extrusion of text and shapes weight text mm-hmm yep you can extrude these because their text layers so if I were to say set my X rotation to one and twirl this open and set this to ramp up you know that's fairly interesting but it'll be a lot more interesting if I change my extrusion depth to 300 so I could put some lights in here these will cast shadows and catch shadows because of course there are a totally native 3d object or I could take this environment layer that I dealt drag it in here right-click choose environment layer then I could open up my material options maybe set metal to 30 reflection intensity to 80 and reflection sharpness to 80 mm-hmm that's pretty interesting what if I were to now open up my transform and animate the layers X rotation from zero to one full rotation let's do a quick preview and see how that feels is it the most amazing 3d thing that ever happened maybe not but it's one layer and two keyframes and I think that's pretty cool so that's it hopefully picked up some cool new tricks and if you can figure this stuff out you can definitely be more efficient next time you just have to bring on some bullet points right I hope this inspires you to not only explore this tool but some other ones as well don't get hung up on the name of the thing and don't be afraid you're just getting here and play and explore it's a really great way to learn this stuff if you want to learn more about motion design check out all the other great tutorials podcasts and articles we have over at school of motion comm and of course if you want to step up your skills even further check out the awesome courses in boot camps we offer I've taken an T 8 for several of them myself and they truly are an excellent way to really level up your skills in a very short time if you'd like to share anything cool you've created using the text animator like this please let us know in the comments and if you have any questions of course feel free to send those our way to thanks for watching this has been Kyle Hamrick with school of motion we'll see you next time you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 773,941

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, Text, Animator, Animation, Stroke, Tapered, Adobe After Effects, Tutorials, Ease, Easy Ease, Kyle, Hamrick

Id: plbsdkRhy8g

Length: 31min 9sec (1869 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 15 2019