i2c - Using Text Animators in After Effects

textile images they are really really useful inside After Effects when you're creating titles and lower thirds and I must say it's something you must know if you're gonna go into motion graphics using After Effects so here I have created a simple composition I have solid as a background and I have a text layer written out using text animators now the first time you're probably gonna come across text animators would be with the presets that come with After Effects so if you go to the effects and presets panel you can expand the animation presets segment we have a whole bunch of stuff you can use but most importantly we want to go into text and in there we want to go to we have a whole bunch of options but I'm gonna go with animate in and you'll find even more presets that you can use so I'm going to grab a random one say a random shuffle in and I'll drop it on my text and now if I move the time you'll see my text is animating in and that's pretty awesome that's pretty nice and you know you know good to go but as far as it goes it's not very good to rely on presets because when you know how the preset works you can go out and create all sorts of fancy things on your own so I'm gonna undo and just close up all of this and now we're gonna create something from scratch so if we go to expand the text layer you'll find out here the animates button see here we get enable per character 3d which is going to come in later we have all transform settings position scale rotation opacity we have fill color of the text stroke color if you have a stroke applied and a bunch of other options that are pretty useful especially blur so okay let's get started by adding position alright so the first thing you'll notice in the viewer is that you get a bunch of X's here and these mark the anchor points for each individual letter including spaces these are used when you apply rotation and scale and they're going to scale about that point or rotate P what about that point so that's pretty important for now we have position applied and that's basically just telling us that zero is here and whatever we apply is it's going to move with it next we also have two markers that are added on either side of the layer and that is the start point and the end point which we'll get to in a second and finally down in the text layer itself we have animator one that's been created it's also come with an Add button and we have range selector 1 and the position property that we've added so the first thing we're going to do is move the position higher and this is going to move the layer down and I'm gonna put this two six eight zero alright so the text has moved out of the screen but before we move forward it's important to note that our Anchor Point is still here which means the transform properties of the text layer itself as a whole is not changing the position is still 960 by 540 which is the center of the composition but we've also done position over here adding 680 to it so it's now moving the layers down by 680 pixels okay that's pretty interesting the main thing about this to note is that you can actually combine this position property and your property of the layer to do all sorts of fancy things when it comes down to it but for now we're going to open up the range selector and see what options it has so first we have start and an offset start is the marker that we saw at the beginning on the left side when we increase this you'll see this indicator moves to the right and basically just animates each letter back in one by one secondly we also have end which is the opposite it's on the other side at the end of the text and when you move that it brings in the letters one by one but from the other side finally we have offset which you use to move both of them at the same time so right now I've put offset to 100 so it's going to add that 100 to start which is going to move it all the way to the other end and when we do the negative it's going to apply minus 100 to the which is going to bring it back to this other side so as you can see here they're both together because well this stays at zero and this becomes zero cause of that minus 100 cool ok let's go back to zero and let's see what else we can do with the range selector when we go into the advanced segment well you're technically ready to go once you use these start and the end hand controls no but these more to it than just simple letter-by-letter animation so if you're going to advanced you'll find a whole bunch of options that are pretty interesting probably check out on your own but most importantly what we want to look at now is based on so right now it's set to characters and as you could tell before it was they were all animating in letter-by-letter and we can change this to words and that's going to do each word one by one and finally we'll go to lines and this will do each line so using text alone and then animators comes in so depending on your usage most times I use lines when I'm working with lots of text that needs to come in pretty fast words is pretty nice it's it's nice and clean it's not too busy and words characters is just nice and fun when you use it nicely so that's how based on works next we have more than amount which we can skip for now those are not things you'll play with very often unless you're going really really advanced and stacking a lot of animators on top of one another but for now what would be more important is to look at shape so currently the shape is set to square and the smoothness is set to 100 so what we have here with the range selector is actually drawing a graph of how much of this position is actually affecting the layer so for now we have Square and we have a smoothness of 100 so as you saw before when we bring stuff in there sort of coming in one letter to type and that's happening because of something interesting that happens in the backend of After Effects and I think it's really important to know exactly what's going on so over here I have paint I have prepared just some text here nothing particularly fancy but I'm gonna grab the brush here and just add in a few details to this sort of text placeholder I have here first I'm going to show you the start marker that we had and the end marker that we had right there probably draw those shapes that's just gonna take forever I don't trust myself so let's assume that this is the range selector and you're telling it exactly what you want to affect currently we have a shape of square so let's draw a little graph down here let's say this is zero and this is 100% you know I can graph like this that looks cool I could do one on this side as well for the end and this is zero so the range selector is basically where this graph sits and when you have square it looks it would look like this where you have a hundred percent all the way and zero outside but since we have a smoothness set of 100 it kind of rounds out a bit and but stays flat at the top and then comes down like this so what happens when you bring in this start to the right side you're actually moving this whole graph you're kind of moving this starts to go like this and it's just squeezing up together until finally start animate and then there's basically nothing in between and the same goes for end you're just moving this this way so what's happening as these as this M kind of meets this sort of dip here it animates back into position so that's what we see when we do with the end you can see the S just comes in as the graph as it meets that curve of the graph okay so what's I mean yeah that's pretty straight forward but what's more important about this is how its treating everything outside Oh mojo there so this should be how its treating everything that's on the outside of this graph so with square as you can see this is zero so it means this end goes to zero this other end goes to zero and everything in between stays at 100 all right interesting well let's go back to After Effects and let's change these characters sorry let's change this shape to wrap-up and now what happens is our shape is well cramping as you can see that U is where it would be if it was not affected by the animator and the S which is the at the end of animators is currently experiencing a hundred percent of the effect of this positioning of 680 it's actually at 680 and all these are in between ok so what's happening now is I really don't like paint guys I don't even know why I'm using it I guess I guess it's fun drag in here it's a lot easier to drag in here I guess so with ramp up what we get is a diagram like this ramping up words so as you remember the you was experiencing zero which is here and the M was experiencing well M is experiencing 100% or rather the S which in this case should have probably written this text out completely but the last letter is going to take 100 so that means that everyone on this side of this everyone on this side is experiencing 100 anyone on this side is experiencing 0 so if we go back and we use the start remember using the start and end is gonna squeeze the graph together ok so let's let me start if I pull this in you'll see they're all coming back up but until we get pretty close about there the s is not moving at all so it's just squeezing that ramp in until about we're back to zero everyone's back to zero as you recall this way is zero this start is here so everyone's experiencing zero so this is not necessarily the best way to go about animating when you have ramp up or rap down selected square is a lot more forgiving but with ramp up and drop down which is affecting the whole area rather than just at the edges it's making it well look a bit weird we have all the letters ramping nicely but when we animate this way this last s especially is a good example as you can see it's coming in on its own but everyone else is sort of moving in together which is not necessarily the worst days definitely a use for that but it's not the best so how would you do it using offset now offset will work by simply just just just like grabbing this whole thing and just moving it like this because the start and end kind of remained the same space so this is what moves so if you go to offset you can check it out now it's a lot smoother if you say to -100 it means our whole graph is on this other side so they're all affected by the range selector and then as we increase this they just slide it nicely uniformly actually so this can also be manipulated if you set this end a bit lower let's say to 25% and we crack this up you'll see that now there's a bit of a hesitation at the beginning but as we start getting to 25% which is what we've subtracted there you see now the gap between the letters is a lot smaller but it's much more uniform now and actually in this case you can see now how it's ramping it actually looks pretty close so with ramp up we have this way ramp down is this way so ramp down the zero is on this side the 100 is on this side and with triangle it's like this it's a lot like square but now you have a slope in between you also have round and you have smooth which is kind of like square but it's a bit more squeezed together so square ramped up ramp down triangle you can see here triangle the S is where it would be the U is way it would be oops this should be zero actually sorry if this is at the default you'll see the S is where it's supposed to be the U is where it's supposed to be but now the effect increases this way and then decreases that way on the last few letters so okay that's pretty that's pretty cool let's stick this to ramp up let's set the offset to minus 100 set a keyframe go up to say 2 seconds and increase this value so they can made in and then we can hit n trim comp to work area so it's not so long and there you have your nice animation alright let's check out the other controls down here which are pretty cool as you can see the text is sort of moving in a uniform speed and then stopping when they get to where they need to go which doesn't necessarily look the best sometimes you want to ease this now when you ease this what's gonna happen is that it's going to the s the last few letters are just going to come in a little bit slower than the rest and that's not necessarily what you would be looking for what you would be looking for is ease high and is low now remember when they are completely being affected by the range selector they are high that experiencing 100% and when they're back to normal it's low zero so if you want to ease this end when they're already showing use ease low so let's set this to 100 and you'll see that now they come in and sort of slow down as they get to the position they need to ease is dependent on the actual characters it's not the whole text layer on its own so you actually don't need to ease these keyframes for the range selector we can set this to words which also produces some really cool sliding in text when you're using ease this can also go to negative which sort of does the opposite it's not as clean sort of just starts slow and then everything just snaps into place it's a lot easier to just simply do 100% of the ease high pretty much the same thing but I tend to find it a bit more forgiving now if you have both of them on one hundred you get some pretty funky results and I think all this is really dependent on the style and the theme you're going for here all right cool let's set ease hi back to zero it's really nice to have text look like it's coming it's already at speed when it's coming in and it's just slowing down when you have is high really up there you can actually just see the text starts to speed up at the bottom which is not the best okay cool that's about the shape so let's manipulate this and try and add sort of bounce to how this text is going to appear in our first example so I'll go to the animator one as we created before it has its position property added in it has my text sliding in for one I'm gonna have to remove the ease because it's way to mess around with my bounce effect the bounce is on that's gonna get the ease so let's go and add another animator that's going to add just the small slide downwards for each for each of the text so let's go to let's deselect animator one let's go animate position and this time we have a position of 680 so we need to do a negative value so here in position we'll do - which was - 680 so let's do minus 120 maybe 150 that should be okay and then we've got a copy the styling so we'll go to advanced we'll go to based on we'll choose words guru shape ramp-up we'll just set the keyframes here so this should be minus 100 and over here should be 100 so now it's back to normal weight was supposed to be and then we'll set this one to have the ease low of actually let's not ease just yet let's see that it's working properly first so I'll select this hit you and I'll just grab these keyframes and just offset them slightly what happen is we have the text comes in and it's a really tiny look but you can see kind of comes down we can just increase this gap a bit and now we have a nice little bounce of course your bounce should be proportional to how fast it stuff is moving so melody is a bit it looks even better when you have characters so you could set this to say it's such based on with the layer selected it's gonna show those two based on settings and Changez two characters and now each of the characters is gonna come in and have that nice little bounce nice no it's bad but what we can't do as well is go to animator one we can go to add property and choose opacity and that way they fade in rather than just appearing from the bottom so there we go so I mean let me expand animator one and you'll see that down here we have no position alongside opacity down here all right that looks pretty pretty nice let's go back to checking out the settings I'm going to remove animator two and we'll go back to our simple animation of our text sliding in and let's see what other options we have we have randomize order which is going to make them each come in well randomly rather than in order which is pretty useful in its own right and I'm gonna switch that off as well so let's go to animator what we go to add and we also have a selector option so we actually have the capability of adding another range selector which is just gonna be so confusing oh my god and I'm just gonna ignore it entirely and go down to wiggly wiggly is we go as you would know so let me add in the wiggly and go to the range selector and I'm just gonna switch off the offset and set it back to zero which is the standard so what we have with Wiggly is that it's basically like taking these two position and opacity properties and adding a wiggle expression to them so they're going to fade randomly they're going to move randomly based on the values you've applied here if I increase this you'll see they now do it in X as well that s is going a bit crazy whereas the U is sort of chilled out remember this is all because we're using ramp up so the effect is becoming stronger from the you going all the way to the S so I should probably set this to square so that everyone's sort of getting the same amount applied to them so the wiggly selector works has the same sort of the same options as the range selector with a few differences max amount is how much of this how much of this is going to use so say let me put this X to zero you can see this one moving up and down but if you set the max the minimum amount to zero they'll only move downwards they won't move upwards same goes for max amount we can also go to based on and change this to words or or lines the same thing still applies and that looks that looks pretty nice and we also have Wiggles per second correlation is how much they wiggle close to each other it's good to see with characters if as you drop this down they sort of all go on their own routes if this is set to zero they just all go crazy about fifty seventy five percent eighty percent is really nice because they just move together easier to keep track of what's going on for the viewer temporal phase is would be most visible if you have more than one and you just want want to be slightly behind the other special phase as well lock dimensions means whatever it does to X is going to do the same amount to Y and you have your random seed so wiggly selector is pretty nice remember it also affects the position it only takes into account what you have down here so if you had scale here they'd scale randomly so I guess we could switch over to that wow that actually looked pretty decent with opacity they just sort of flashing that's really nice to just leave playing the background in its own animator okay I digress so let's see what other selector we have weekly is pretty fun if you need to switch it on and off it's also controlled by the range selector so if I move this start up you'll see it reduces its effect completely or it can also happen the other way around so you just basically use the range selector just as you did before the quickly just adds that little extra dimension of of interestingness to the text finally we have add selector expression now this is gonna be pretty tricky if you do use expressions this is pretty weird it's not really what you'd expect it to do what it does so the way we have this Wiggly sort of playing around with the amount this basically affects the range selector itself not necessarily the opacity or the position or whatever you have going on this one is pretty interesting so I'll go to property and add position crank this up and you'll see we can remove the Wiggly and just have this doing that expression Rachel its core advanced still at square and this is now the expression controller that's making it look like ramp because it's taking selector value which is this and it's basically doing what ramp up ramp down does it lets you create your own graph for how the letters are going to be affected by the properties that are down here now that might sound a bit complicated but I think one of my favorite ways of using the expression selector and probably the only way I will ever use this is to alternate letters so what you can do is go if you're into expressions this is pretty awesome if you're not this you're gonna hate this part but we're gonna type if text index percent 2 is greater than 0 select a value else - select value ok that should work if that works it works amazing ok so what's happening here is it's good to check the index of the text now the text index works just like index in any other control that you've leaned in like layers layer index would be this text is index 1 deep sigh else read one is index 2 so it's gonna count each letter so 1 2 3 4 5 6 and so on and it's going to check now this is modulo which basically it's going to take this value and divide it by 2 and it's going to check if the remainder is greater than 0 I think I should just throw this let's go file you so how modular works is if you were to do say 5/3 and you know you do 1/3 that leaves you the two you can't really do anything so modulus answer is going to be two so that means that basically whatever you divide if it leaves a remainder if it leaves a remainder it's going to tell you what that remainder is so in this case we're telling you to divide everything by two and that only and the only time it's ever gonna leave a reminder it divided by two is if you're using an odd number so one you know something like you know let's see it's completely gonna disregard this number by the way at the top so say you do a ten and you have a two here you know this is five so you get ten and this is zero so the result is going to be zero but if you do 11 divided by two you're gonna get five ten and you'll be left to the one so this one is what we're looking for and we're going to say greater than zero this means that for all even numbers basically for all even numbers which means the ones that will give a result of zero use selector value and for all numbers that do not divide because they're gonna give a number of greater than zero use - selector value and what's gonna happen with that is that you get each of these letters alternating giving opposite results so you'll see here that if I set this to ramp up so it's a bit smoother you can see they all sort of scissors scissor in and and closing like this which looks pretty damn cool I think it looks cool I don't know about you guys but it looks video so an email just comes in mmm really nice maybe if you do with words you can see with the words the individual letters also splitting up that's because down here have to do words as well so let's see yeah you see using comes from down text comes from up animators comes from down this doesn't work so well with opacity because opacity can't go negative when you said to negative select a value it can't go minus zero so you might see that's one of them is not free text is not fading because opacity can't go - but the rest can't so pretty pretty cool isn't it I think it really is I think it's useful in some cases not always though so that's the expression selector only for advanced users I think if you really understand how expressions work this is pretty useful so you get text index selector value and also text total which is the total number of texts in there so if you can think of a cool way to make a graph that would be pretty awesome and we know how all the selectors work expression range and Wiggly let's take a look at a quick example of how you can use text animators simple enough to create something like a title card we can go to say using text elevators let's say that's the title of this movie we can go animate sorry let's move animator 1 and start from scratch but we will animate enable per character sorry position we'll go animate enable per character 3d that's gonna make this layer a 3d layer it's gonna have these two little boxes meaning that it's an animator that's making a 3d and not the standard CD that you used to and now we can actually move this in Zed so I'll move this forward all the way I'll go add property and we'll choose rotation and we'll rotate this in Y by let's say two rotations and then we'll animate this so let's go down to the range selector let's go advanced let's grab shape to wrap up offset to minus 100 so that all of them are affected by the range selector and then this to plus 100 so that none of them are affected by the range selector and now we get this cool they sort of still slapping onto the screen so let's go to YZ low and new 100 and that should just slow them down as they get into position we can switch on motion blur on the layer and on the composition and that will allow it to come in pretty nicely alright that looks pretty nice not quite interesting enough we can add randomize order and that's just gonna make them come in randomly so that you know you don't really know what's going on until all the letters are there and that looks cool actually looks pretty cool yeah and you sort of mess around these you can go words and that's gonna bring in one word at a time but notice that they each spin individually they're still spinning by character even though we did based on words so if you go up to the more options you can expand that area will get anchor point grouping remember those little X's we saw and we were tweaking this control when we added the animator it's that's what that's about so we can select say position here you see the X's here on each letter but if you come on over to the anchor point grouping we can change this to word and that's going to put the anchor point right in the middle of each word for those letters so now we get them all spinning in together like this we can still set the range selector down here to use characters and now the characters are going to spin on the axis of the word so as you can see with the T there the T sort of spinning all around all the other texts especially they are that's because the anchor point is set to the word and with this line where we have two words if you set this to line it's gonna look way funky like crazy funky it's really it's really really cool and pretty easy to pull off alternatively we also have grouping alignment so if I set this to character again this time let's use the X rotation so also these two too and you'll see they sort of flip at the bottom like this and we can go up and choose let's say words first that doesn't really do a difference because the anchor point is still at the bottom but if we go to grouping alignment we can move the anchor point up so that it's in the middle right there so as the text animates it sort of doesn't flip downwards or upwards you could do the opposite maybe put them at the top and now spins like that you know once again entirely up to you depending on the use case and what you intend to do with it but I think it's really really awesome all right well that's it for most of the settings that you can play with let's take our final example and look at how we can make something that isn't necessarily text and I really like this part because because this is where I get yeah I just get to do some funky things so I'll add a new text layer I wouldn't type anything out inside just yet I'll just click away grab the cursor here I can show the title action safe so I can see the center and I'll grab the ellipse tool and with the text layer selected I'm gonna find the center there which is 960 by 540 in the info panel so let's see there we go we can hold control shift just to draw a nice circle right in the middle and we can let go and then we could go to text go to path options and we'll choose path as mask 1 which is a circle we just drew and we can just put a bunch of what do I want underscores so let's just do this you'll see this just sort of fill in the circle there which looks cool as well now we have these two here that are kind of joined which is hell for my OCD so let's come here to the hmm Foss alignment we're gonna switch that on and now rather than appearing at the bottom like they were before they'll sort of just spread out like this so we can already kind of see a whole bunch of stuff I could do with something like this that should do and let's go to first margin and we'll just spread these out a bit better was it last margin that I want to tweak our last margin is a bit better but this is kind of not in the center so it's already annoying but but there should be okay we can hide the masks maybe just rotate this so that I could stop worrying about it so much there we go and okay so now we're just gonna use the animators as we had before and I'm sorry guys I'm just gonna fill this in completely it looks way cooler when you have a lot of them let's go to more options sorry path options and let's bring this in until it's about the same spacing as all the others that looks okay to me and then now we can add our text animators so let's go animate I'm gonna add blur and we can unlink this to blur them in sort of different directions here X looks pretty trippy and Y is also pretty nice so I'll do a building a lot in the Y just a little bit in the X just to so it's not completely blurred out and then we'll go add property position and we can move these guys into the center by moving the Y and then we can add property opacity and set opacity to zero so now they're completely gone but if we go to range selector one and we move the start you'll see and they come so here's one of the problems is square with each of them coming in one by one you have about let's see one two three about four frames of each there abouts they're moving in a bit too fast you're gonna have to make this animation pretty slow if you want to see them individually so what we'll do is set this back to 0 go to advanced and under shape I'll set this to ramp up and now they come in sort of this spiral II it's a spiral II goodness it's pretty pretty dope and I like how the blood out it looks like they're sort of coming in from depth of field which is pretty nice it could also try out randomize order on and that's just gonna bring them in randomly like this pretty nice so let's animate that so I'll zoom in here offset is minus 100 let's go to two seconds increase this now they're all visible cool and let's add some emphasis of some kind so I'll click away go to animate and choose fill color RGB and that's gonna change the color of the text and it's going to add it as animator - so Annie so just like we had done earlier with the Bounce animator - is going to add on top of what's going on so currently fill color is not being done by animator one so it's not gonna be affected but if we added more blur or more position or more opacity as long as animator tweeze applying it's going to affect animator one even an animator one is at zero so you usually want to have something like opacity and blur in animator one if it's going to be your in animation but for now we only need to work with fill color so I'm gonna change this to let's see this light blue color I can also add property and choose scale and we can just scale this up a bit so you'll see that my text is sort of moving out of position on my scale and that's because of the Anchor Point so let's switch this on let's just grab the animator - and let's try and find that grab scale there's our anchor point this kid seats right there not so good so let's go more options and move this so that it's touching just touching the text there we go and now when we scale this sort of this scale and maintain that position so we could do this way and outwards so that it kind of fills that circle and we can do red you can go back to red as the color and range selector let's go to advanced and let's go to randomize order on we just change up random seed so that it doesn't look like the previous one as unlikely as that can be and then we'll do offset so let's go actually here and do shape the stages to triangle and when we do the offset we'll get something pretty funky like this that's pretty cool so two seconds let's click here let's push this two three let's go plus 100 we can hit you here and we can actually even make this thing span the entire time okay this is this comp is way too long let's do 6 seconds here and let's Spanish the whole way so now even as it's coming in it's sort of still doing that I read thing that you could put this in the center and send this all the way back to minus 100 so it kind of happens twice like that and then we'll say ok this is our sort of targeting reticle that it's looking for a target so let's do let's do that it's actually found its target and we'll go to here to 4 seconds I'm just basically going to duplicate this remember it's set to triangle and triangle on either side was set to come on and off so when offset goes from minus one order to 100 it's going to go on and off and so we'll just duplicate a demeter two we'll go down to the range selector advanced and we'll go to ramp up and it can keep the red color it could keep the scaling and this time we'll set the offset off just just do it again so this is currently when it's fully on so we'll put it fully off and go over here and just put a keyframe there and then set this to minus 100 so it's fully on I can add position and this can help me make the circle a little smaller maybe scale these like this so it looks more like a sort of targeting reticle let's say like that and now what's going to happen is it comes in it has its little subtle animation and then they sort of go down into that position so let's give this a watch whoops okay that's pretty slow let me bring this in so you can see the animator - an animator three are sort of adding on top of each other that's what you can see this is scaling so crazily it's still animator - doing this so remember transform has been left untouched so we can literally just say scale this down like that sighs put it over here we can wiggle its position just to kind of make it look like it's chasing a target so let's do 900 so it kind of moves around target sighted captured you know there's a bit too much and let's do 450 it's found its target and target locked cool let's add a bunch of these duplicate duplicate and there we go and man how much baby know anyone I think it could I think it could pass you know he's locked onto his targets bear when he fires his rockets as you can see they also ha tend to have sort of a similarity to how they animate if we look here say this frame you can see they all look exactly the same so you can select them all go to search and type random seed and just tweak them so give this something else give this something else and give it something else and now they kind of you know oops yes there you go as you can see down sort of shaking as it changes um oh this is just for one layer so we can go to the others and just make sure they each have different values of random seed just to be sure that they all don't look the same but you know this is so there we go all right guys thanks for checking out this tutorial I'm David Alex from ideas to creations let me know what you make with your animators just drop a link in the comments below and if you have any questions feel free to holler here on the Facebook page or on Twitter I'm mostly online and well thanks for watching your feedback is appreciated but that's it for now and I will see you guys in the next tutorial

Channel: Ideas to Creations

Views: 3,585

Keywords: Adobe After Effects, tutorial, workflow, text animators, animation, motion graphics, range selector, ease, animator, i2c, ideas to creations

Id: KElpyd94NqE

Length: 42min 31sec (2551 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2016