Text animator's Expression selector explained | Quick After Effects Tip

the text animators are really powerful in After Effects but did you know that besides the default range selector mode there is an expression selector that is super useful but not particularly intuitive and I feel often overlooked it has these three variables the selector value is the percentage of how strongly the effects in this case the FI color is getting applied to the text by default it will be 100% unless you have other selectors on your text layer before it for example if you limit a range of 0 to 50% before it the latter half of the characters aren't affected by the expression because the selector value has been set to zero for them by the previous selector the text index is the sequential position of each character or word or line depending on which mode you've chosen so this character has text index one this has two this has three and so on and text total is just a number of total characters in this text layer so I reckon the best way to think about this is that this expression will get calculated for each individual character an output a value between 0 and 100 that indicates how much these effects under this text animator affect that particular character so in this default State the reason we're getting this gradient is because for each character its text index is getting divided by the total number of characters so that every next character is getting increasingly more red color than the previous one as the text index is counting up from left to right so how can you use this expression selector to your advantage well you can use some simple math to achieve effects that otherwise would be really cumbersome to do for example you can affect every other letter by calculating module of two from the text index if you haven't worked with modulo before I have a whole video about it go check it out or if you want to flip the selection you can just minus one from the text index or you can do modulo three to affect every two out of three characters or you can introduce the time variable to get some interesting and complex looking animations going or let's say you want to affect the first and the last character of the text layer no matter how long the text layer is for example you would like these quotation marks to have a different color than the rest of the text you can can write a really simple short conditional statement saying that if text index equals one so the first character or text index equals the text total which would be also the number of the last character then the value is 100 for all the other characters it's zero or we can create some wild color effects as you can see the expression selector actually takes an array of three values so we can control red green and blue channels separately if we go and set the text color to Black and then our animator field color to white so it has all the color channels at maximum intensity to work with we can now use the array of values to control the color for example if we go zero for red 100 for green zero for blue we get a green text or we can generate say a random number between 0 and 100 for each of the channels and we get a text that has a random color each frame but remember that this expression gets run for each character individually so it can have a unique random seed for each of them by using their text index as the seed number if you don't want it animating you can lock the random seed by adding TR to the seed random it's a really powerful technique because you have a lot of control over the randomness for example you can hook up a slider control to control the random seed you can tame the randomness with blending it with specific color lots of possibilities

Channel: ruthlessly quick AE tips

Views: 473

Keywords: after effects, motion, motion design, motion graphics, tips, tricks, techniques, hacks, workflow, vfx, gfx, mgfx, expressions, effects, quick, fast

Id: w3Re1dxElIc

Length: 3min 17sec (197 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024