Animating text in adobe after effects

To show these properties in numbers of characters including spaces , choose Index for Units in the Advanced property group of a range selector. You can create elaborate animations using several animators and several selectors, each of which adds its influence to the text animation.

Animator properties work much like other layer properties, except that their values only influence the characters that are selected by the selectors for the animator group. Choose Enable Per-Character 3D to add 3D properties to a text layer; this command does not add properties to an animator group. Anchor Point. Anchor point for the characters: the point about which transformations—such as scaling and rotation—are performed.

See Text anchor point properties. The position of the characters. You can specify values for this property in the Timeline panel, or you can modify it by selecting it in the Timeline panel and then dragging the layer in the Composition panel using the Selection tool, which changes to a move tool when positioned over text characters. Dragging with the move tool does not affect the z depth component of Position.

The scale of the characters. Because scale is relative to the anchor point, changes to the z component of Scale have no apparent result unless the text also has an Anchor Point animator with a nonzero z value.

The slant of the characters. The Skew Axis specifies the axis along which the character is skewed. If per-character 3D properties are enabled, you can set the rotation about each axis individually. Otherwise, only Rotation which is the same as Z Rotation is available. All Transform Properties. The alignment for the tracking in each line of text.

Line Spacing. Character Offset. The number of Unicode values to offset selected characters. For example, a value of 5 advances the characters in the word five steps alphabetically, so the word offset becomes tkkxjy.

Character Value. The new Unicode value for selected characters, replacing each character with one character represented by the new value. For example, a value of 65 replaces all of the characters in a word with the 65th Unicode character A , so the word value becomes AAAAA. Character Range. Specifies limits on the character. This property appears whenever you add the Character Offset or Character Value property to a layer. Groups include uppercase Roman, lowercase Roman, digits, symbols, Japanese katakana, and so forth.

Choose Full Unicode to allow for unlimited character changes. The amount of Gaussian blur to be added to the characters. Horizontal and vertical blur amounts can be specified separately. Each animator group includes a default range selector.

You can replace the default selector, add additional selectors to an animator group, and remove selectors from a group. Selectors are a lot like masks: You use selectors to specify which part of a range of text you want to affect, and by how much. You can use multiple selectors and specify a Mode setting for each one to determine how it interacts with the text and with other selectors in the same animator group.

If you have only one selector, Mode specifies the interaction between the selector and the text—Add is the default behavior; and Subtract inverts the influence of the selector. If you delete all selectors from an animator group, the values of the animator properties apply to all characters in the layer. This technique is useful because properties of the text specified by the Character panel cannot otherwise be animated except by using Hold keyframes on the Source Text property itself.

Use a Wiggly selector to vary a selection within a specified amount over time. Use expression selectors to use expressions to dynamically specify how much you want characters to be affected by an animator property. Specifies how each selector combines with the text and with selector above it, similar to how multiple masks combine when you apply a mask mode.

For example, if you want to wiggle only a specific word, use a range selector on that word and then add a Wiggly selector and set it to Intersect mode. Specifies how much the range of characters is affected by animator properties. This option is useful for animating the result of animator properties over time. Using an expression selector, you can use expressions to dynamically set this option. Units and Based On. The units for Start, End, and Offset. You can use either the percentage or index units and base the selection on the characters, characters excluding spaces, words, or lines.

If you select Characters, After Effects counts spaces and effectively pauses the animation between words as it animates the spaces between words. Range selectors include the following properties, in addition to properties common with other selectors:. Start and End. The beginning and end of the selection.

You can modify the Start and End properties by dragging the selector bars in the Composition panel when the selector is selected in the Timeline panel. The amount to offset the selection from the selection specified by the Start and End properties. Controls how characters are selected between the Start and End of the range. Each option modifies the selection by creating transitions between selected characters using the chosen shape. Very often, I encounter After Effects students that want to create text animation that appears to start from inside of the viewable area.

This is a very easy process that can be mastered in a very short period of time. Let's begin! In here, we will write two separate lines of text separated by a solid bar from which the text will eventually appear.

Let's type the first line of text, which could be anything you want. Create another text box and type a second line of text.

Align them and position them so that one is on top of the other. After you are done, make sure that no layers are selected. Grab the rectangle tool and draw a line that will go in between the two lines of text. After you are done, the text and line will look something like this. Now we will add a Text Animator to the first line of text.

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Please contact us if you have questions or concerns about the Privacy Notice or any objection to any revisions. All rights reserved. Join Sign In. After Effects provides a vast array of capabilities for effective and creative 2D and 3D text animation.

The resource and examples you'll find here provide detailed instructions on how to animate your text in After Effects. Harry Frank provides a tutorial on animating text with text animators on the Digital Arts Online website.

Steve Holmes provides a tutorial on the Layers Magazine website that uses three text animators and per-character 3D text animation to create a text animation. Colin Braley provides a tutorial and example project on his website that show how to use an expression on the Source Text property to animate text to overcome some of the limitations of the Numbers effect. Eran Stern provides a video tutorial on the Creative COW website that demonstrates how to use per-character 3D text animation to animate text along a path in the shape of a 3D tornado.

Angie Taylor provides a tutorial on the Digital Arts website that shows how to use per-character 3D text animation together with a common workaround for simulating extruded 3D text.

Eran Stern provides a video tutorial on the Artbeats website that shows how to use the After Effects text animation system as a particle system. Rich Young collects several resources and tutorials for creating extruded 3D text in After Effects. Toby Pitman shows tricks for using shape layers to animate text on the MacProVideo website. This example illustrates how you can easily animate individual characters in 3D so that each character steps out of line and takes a bow.

This example illustrates how you can easily animate random characters so that they gradually form a legible word or phrase by specifying a Character Offset value and animating the range selector. This example demonstrates how easy it is to animate the position of individual characters. It also shows how the Wiggly selector can create a dramatic change to the animation simply by adding it to the layer.

If you add the Fill Hue property to Animator 1 and then add the Wiggly selector, both the position and the colors wiggle, instead of just the colors. This example shows you how easy it is to isolate characters when tracking a line of text. Using the Tracking and Line Anchor animator properties, you can easily move all but one or a few characters. You can easily create the appearance of writing on the screen by using the Opacity animator property.

This example uses the selectorValue parameter in an Expression selector with the Wiggly selector to make a string of characters flash on and off randomly. This example uses the textIndex and textTotal attributes with the wiggle expression to animate a line of text.

The linear method is used in this example to ramp down the maximum wiggle amount over time. A new text layer is created, with an expression on the Source Text property that makes the text show the current time in the time display format set for the project. Create incredible motion graphics, text animation , and visual effects with Adobe After Effects. Design for film, TV, video, and web.