Text Animators for Beginners - After Effects Type Tutorial

in this after effects tutorial we're going to learn about text animators make some nice neat templated text effects and if you stick around at the end of the video i got a little present for you all right so let's get into it [Music] all right so right off the bat here is something that i learned way too late in my motion design career you can change this source text to anything you want if you just open up this little text drop-down you can make key frames on the source text so if you just make a new keyframe here and you can change this to whatever you want so source to horse and then make a new keyframe and you can change it again of course and you can change this font to something different you can change the styling and the color change it to strokes and change the size the tracking the kerning stroke width anything like this and it will just change on each new keyframe this can only be hold keyframes of course um this cannot ease between these keyframes i don't know how after effects would figure that out but this can be really useful for simple animations where you just need to change your source text on one layer now to create a basic slide in animation like this something really simple we're going to want to use text animators so that we can save them and reuse them on other parts of our animation so what i'm going to do is hide this little text layer and start a new one here so i have something fresh what i want to do is i want to click where it says text here and click animate and then i have all of these options that come up and now you can add animators of really anything regular position scale rotation opacity you can animate colors strokes tracking and other things like blur and character offsets we're going to get into a lot of this stuff so let's just go ahead and add on a position and an opacity we want to slide in and fade in so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a keyframe on the position and the opacity at let's say one second this will be our ending point we're going to slide into here and fade in and then we'll just go back and let's say drag it down to maybe around 35 and then opacity at zero and then we'll go ahead and ease the second keyframes with f9 easy ease and we have a simple slide in that can be copy and pasted on to other text layers that is a simple introduction to the text animators let's take it a step further shall we now this is what i like to call the sexy slide-in you have each line letter or word fade and slide in by itself and then slide back out and this is all on one block it can work as a paragraph or lines or whatever and we just have a few keyframes set so let's go about making this i'm going to create a new block of text let me just copy this though so i don't have to retype it out i'm just going to draw a block of character text it doesn't have to be a block you could just just be whatever let me clean that up there we go okay so here's what i want to do i want to drop down my text open it up and i want to add on some animators i want to animate the position and i want to animate the opacity let me drag this up so we can see it a little bit better now to create this text animation we need to basically have two states it needs to have a position one where it starts down and then a position two where it animates up so we're gonna call this we're gonna rename this animator one into position one this is just for our own clarity and then we're gonna duplicate this with controller command d and now we have position two and if you drop this down you can see we have our position and opacity animators if we wanted to add something else to it like a rotation or something we would just need to add those animators in as well but we're just doing position and opacity so now we need to do is we need to change the position and opacity amounts in the first position so let's pull this down a little bit because it's going to start down so maybe we'll go down to 35 and bring the opacity down to zero you're not going to notice a change on the opacity right now and then on position two we want to counteract that so we're going to make this negative 35 and then it's going to move back up and then we want to change that opacity to 100 it's already at 100 so basically what we're saying to this is it's gonna start at 35 and then come back up to 35 and it's going to go from zero opacity to 100. but now we need to animate this so on the position 2 let's drop down the range selector and we want to animate the offset here so now if we grab this offset and you move it around you can start to see that it's animating these properties so let's bring it back down all the way to negative 100 make a keyframe and then push it forward until all of the text is on screen so it would be at zero here now if we play it back it's going to look something like this it's kind of getting there but it's it's pretty choppy and a little weird so let's open up this advanced property this advanced drop down and let's see we're working with well i think i for now i don't want this to animate in characters i want this to animate in lines so let's have it be in lines and it's a little bit nicer now and i think we need to add some easing to this so let's go ahead and change a few things to deal with the easing well i think we need to make it so that this shape is not a square this shape is going to ramp down i'm going to explain that in a minute if we change the shape to ramp down now we're seeing that it's not animating fully all the way we need to change the offset to get to 100 now and if we change that now we're getting the full animation coming on and now we need to change some of the easing so if we change the ease high a little bit to crank this up a little bit maybe around 80 or 90. we're gonna have a little bit nicer of an animation when it slides up if we didn't do the ease high we did the ease low it's going to be the wrong way you can play with this and see how it looks it's the wrong direction it could be right for some text animation but it's not this one so let's put this back up and there we go here is our slide-in that looks good these are the right properties that we want we can now change this to be characters and we'll have something like this looks good but i'm going to leave it at either words or lines so now let's quickly go over what some of this stuff in here means and i learned this from kyle hamrick's really good text animator video so i suggest you check those out if you want to learn more i'm totally stealing this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to set down a new text and just put down a bunch of periods now if you do this put down a bunch of periods and you try animating the position and you just send a little bit of animation through them so you just change the position and you change the offset a little bit this is the easiest way to see how these different properties are affecting it so right now we have square selected and basically all it's doing is it's sending a square through your text animator shape if i change this to ramp up you can see that it's basically just sending a upwards facing ramp through this if i change it to ramp down it's sending a downwards facing ramp through these in my opinion it's backwards this looks like an upwards facing ramp but i don't make the rules with this and so on a triangle sends a triangle through it round makes a round shape that gets sent through and you can see how the different easing will affect these things so i really advise that you just play around with something like this to get acquainted with these different things in here now for a flicker in i took basically the same slide in that we just learned so let me pop this open here so i took the same old animation [Music] the position one and position two just to show that you can build things off of each other and now let's go ahead and just add a new animation on top so i'm gonna add in a new opacity it's not under either of these animations from before a brand new opacity let's go ahead and add that and i'll keep this one at the bottom and now what i want to do is i want to pop down the range selector here i'm going to drag this window up so you can see it better and all i'm really going to do is i'm going to animate this offset from 0 to 100 so we're sorry negative 100 to zero so it's going to come in like this animate in but we're going to add a little twist to this so we're going to turn on randomize order so it's going to randomize this order that the letters animate in and then we're going to put a little expression on the random seed like this by alt clicking on random seed and we'll type in time times any number say 100 to give it this little flicker this the number the higher the number that you choose the faster it will flicker now we have a little flicker when it animates in and then i'll just copy these keyframes in reverse when we need it to animate out now we have a cool flicker there are tons of little weird uh properties in here too that you can just have tons of fun with as well so for example if i turn this off turn on my fresh layer i'm going to open this up and let's say i just want to wiggle a bunch of things around let me throw on a position animator and a rotation here we go now with this animator i can add what's called a selector and if i add a wiggly selector to it now i'm wiggling the position and rotation before right off the bat nothing's happening because i didn't put in any values to the position and rotation so if i put in some amounts so i'm going to put in some vertical amounts for the position and i'll put in some rotation amounts now i'm wiggling these letters around and we can go ahead and open up the more options and we can actually change around the anchor points of the letters to choose where they're getting wiggled from now what's really useful about text animators and wiggling stuff is that most big font families support things like unicode and what that means is you can grab arrows and pointers sometimes smiley faces and emojis and you can just use these in your text and now just easily make weird kind of useful shapes like this i do this all the time to animate arrows and stuff that would normally be really a real big pain to animate by hand in after effects so just really easily i made this weird kind of rotating arrow line that would uh otherwise be really hard to do and so this is a very basic example but if you're if you get clever with it this can this can be really useful now since you made it the end of the video have a little gift for you in the description there is a link where you can download a bundle of text animators i have made for you to use however you would like so all you have to do is go ahead and drop them into your presets folder i like to drop them into the text um folder you can go ahead and rename them you're not going to offend me all right i just did this for organization and then to apply them you can just search in the effects and presets or use fx console and then when you make a new text layer and just go ahead and type in whatever nyx flicker and then you will have a nice flicker effect now if you want to make your own text preset all you have to do is make the text animation and then just grab all the animators that you want to save and you just highlight them all here and then you click animation save animation preset you need to save them to your presets folder if you get an error like you can you don't have permission to save them there then you just save them somewhere else and then drag them in and you get permission when you're doing this you need to make sure that you don't grab things like for example the source text or other properties that you don't want applied to that animation preset each time because if i was to save the source text along with these then it would apply the text flicker every time you applied that animation reset so go ahead and enjoy these text animators use them however you'd like you did not need to give credit or anything although if you'd like to tag me on instagram or something i would love to see what you do with them thank you for watching thank you for watching my youtube video if you liked it you're probably gonna like these but check them out all right i'll wait

Channel: Motion by Nick

Views: 149,812

Keywords: after effects, after effects tutorial, text animation in after effects, after effects text animation, after effects transitions, after effects animation, after effects project file, after effects tutorial beginner, text animators, after effects text, motion design, intro templates, adobe after effects tutorial, after effects text tutorial

Id: IJ3QHNQSJg8

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021

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[u/motionick]

In this After Effects tutorial, we are going to learn how to use text animators so you can master typography animations!

Download the free preset pack here.