Lessons

Lesson Info

Animated Text

Text is handled in three d space like vector graphics are it looks at the edges of it so you can extrude text just like he can extruding shape layers um but if you want to bend something it has to be rest arise basically it's got to be a graphic element or a layer that's that's, rast arised or a subcompact some kind so while we've got text here let's talk about text just for a little bit I'm not going to get into it a lot because we do cover that quite extensively in some of the other workshops, but one thing that you're going to have to do is be able animate text that's one of the reasons why you're in here I'm sure is because you've got a text that's in print or you've got to move something you've got to make it move and as I've shown with some of my other examples uh, moving that text is just as important as moving all the other graphic elements a nice thing is is you don't have to be an animator toe have cool text come in, they've got a lot of really great presets so you can come u...

p to your effects and presets panel I've just got a regular text layer in here uh you come up to your, uh, effects and presets and you come down here to text and you control that down and you can look at all the different things and you can play around and just start applying things uh, some of these presets to your text I can go in there and either drag or double click this and it will apply this over time it will have the animation for me. So that's one little effect it's called decoder. Okay, so you go in and joy reid and play around in there or especially if you're new to it. It's really a cool thing to come up here to this many palate menu here, which we haven't really gotten into with any of these pallets yet, but that's, this little guy here is little icon here. It's got a little line there it's basically like a fake menu with a little twirly carrots into it, and I go up to that. I just click on that and I select browse presets now what that does that opens up adobe bridge fairly quickly in most cases I've got I've got other things going on in there. Um, yeah, okay, all right. Yes, yes, yes to everything. Give me everything this is I've got two versions of aftereffects running on here, so you have to kind of bear with me here, so I've got a folder here called text I double click that to open it and then I've got these other elements here which allow me to play with the text, but I get to see it here if I do animate in and I click on this sea where did my preview window go? Is that to come in here should come in here? It's taken a little bit to load here because I think it's it's kind of freaking out a little bit because I did install some other stuff on here to show you later so it might be confusing between the two versions there we go just took a while for it to come up so this shows you here is your it's going to loop what the effect will do so you just click on it? You don't have to double click it, click it once and this gives you a nice preview about what all these effects do so it's a really nice way to kind of shop and design as you go or if you're working with an editor or our producer or somebody or client you go, they go well, I just want something fancy I want something nice to come in it's like well, like how do you want your text to come in while I don't know I'd have to see it well instead of wasting all your time making twenty different variations you set him down and you go over this with him and you say hey here's some cool things I think might work and they look at it go oh yeah that's what I want so and that's what you want do you wantto one inspire them and save your time at the same time? So this is really cool way of doing it a little matrix effect here just cool so I'm going to double click this and it's going to apply that directly to my text here I could do a ram preview allow animates in so I think that's pretty slick way of getting your text in um let me see I'm going to pick one smooth move in, grab that and just try that show you to what if you wanted to speed up or slow down? Well that's where you can come in here and you look at the text you see there's there's key frames in there, but they're kind of hidden little black dots down here see that you know there's key frames in there, but you can't click on and you can't access him that means they're inside something that that you have to open up, you've got to roll something down so I look I just go in here and I kind of hunt around and I figure out where all those key frames are okay, that is that means that's opacity that means that's fading in ah, this one here the animator just twirl it down and I look and see oh there's key frames there so I can keep twirling until I see all of these key frames are exposed now if I want to speed it up or slow it down, all I have to do is select all those key frames full fast there so I've got to see they're yellow they're all selected so now I can spread them out to slow him down, make it nice and smooth but play back here that's really slow or I can squishing together make him come in really fast there we go so you don't have to sit there in hand anime all these little pieces you can you go in there and customize them you can joy, right? Actually, that's one great way to learn about these animators um is to go in there, enjoy rights just start moving key frames around and see what they do. We're just start changing elements um and playing around enjoy right I really encourage you to do that because you'll learn a lot about how this whole animation engine works, but I'm not going to get into that today just showing you how to apply some, uh some text effects from animation effects into your texts you can get them to move on and off the screen against we go back to bridge we'll be able to see there's also uh animate out if we go to our text there's animate inanimate out and those presets are all in there that show you know different options for out animations sometimes what I'll do if I animate something in a certain way I wanted to go out the same way I'll copy it the effect and then I'll just I'll just copy key frames and just reverse him on the way out I'm just doing the opposite then go ahead and quit bridge here it's kind of freaking freaking out on the air so let's uh let's go ahead and undo that stuff so it shouldn't have any text animator in there there we go good. All right, so going back to a three d environment um let me turn a couple of these things off that air preset and again this this particular project will be available to download so, uh let me see let me double let me duplicate this. I'm going to duplicate this layer real easy command d control d duplicates it right there in the timeline uh I'm going to take my geometry option hands off and turn that back to zero so kind of kind of gave away the trick there that was that we saw the rabbit in the hat first so here's just a camera move around a single plane with a single spotlight on it kind of has a rembrandt look to it's kind of nice actually, um and I want to add some dimension to this thing. I wanted to have a kind of a semi circular curvature to it because it is just a jape. European p and g h b j paya png could be a photo shop layer it could be an illustrator layer um, that that hasn't been changed to a shape. So anything that's non victory ized it's not a shape and it's not text. Then you can apply this type of three dimensional effect to it in its geometry, and that is to actually curve it or bend it uh, it only really bands in in one dimension. You can't make it like a rubber sheet or anything you have to use, like three d invigorate or some other program to do that plug in to do that. But this does allow you to curve it, and you can tell it how many segments you wanted to curve by. So if I just said three on here and I say one hundred percent curve, then it's going to look like three panels like a science fair set up a booth? Um, which is cool if you want that effect, you may want that have it look like a bent board or something or part of a box or whatever ah, you can give it like seven and it'll look like kind of a trade show booth uh, effect you can see at the top here it's got some straight lines I find that going to about twenty or twenty five gives you a nice smooth round uh, band in your surface there without it taking too much of your processor time if I went to like one hundred, it would just take that much longer to render and so I'm always trying to find that great balance between the two, so I'm gonna go to twenty five and get told that back down to about seventy five percent of curvature and that way I got this nice soft bend in here so I've got this yosemite text here I can bring that in as its own layer and just get dragging in because the other ones already processed dragged that in and it comes in two d I have to make it three d so I got to click this box. So now it's three d so it's in three d space here. So if I look I'll see some of the site of some of the lettering is gone that's because on in three d space I have to move it around it's actually being cut off by that other layer that's been around it, so if I was to push it back you know, it just starts disappearing because it gets cut off. It actually has a cut off with the other layer. It actually interacts with that layer, which is a good thing because we we really want interaction. We want things to be able tio interact with each other. So what I've got to do here, those I've got to scale it up. So, uh, scale now, it's okay to scale this even though it's a sub comp of text, I'm still gay. Get that nice clean line edge because it's still text inside, eh? So it's okay to scale this up because I'm just making text bigger. Okay, so scale that up. I'll move it out, away from the surface little bit. They're bringing a little more okay and bring it out and then over just a little more. Here we go. So now it's just straight text in front of a curved surface here. So I want to have a cast, a shadow. So the first thing I have to do is come down here to my material options and turn on cast shadows. Then I could see how close it is to my background. Ok? And then you can see the curvature back there by the way, the shadows hit the back backdrop from the light so what if I wanted to curve this one while I can because again it's a comp so I could go to my geometry go to twenty five for the segments go to seventy five for the curve in that way it will match the background now I just lost it because it went back there so I've got to go to position and this way I'll just bring it forward here we go because since I curved it it kind of pushed it back so now it's the same curvature he has my backdrop and I just have to position it in place so now when I animate through this I've got the nice bendy text over the bendy background it's all bendy bendy bendy wonderful um okay so what if I wanted to have that text actually be a uh a what oh extruded that's the word I need coffee or something I guess I'm losing my my terminology here that's right? Coffee step ok, so I've got text this I didn't bring the text layer in as a cop I brought it in just as texting see the little t down here this does signifies that this is actually a text file I can change change the text by double clicking on it and type something else in there we're going toe let's say yosemite here so I can apply my extrusion get like twenty er I can give it a convex edge and I can ramp that up to, like four and that makes the bevel a little more round he looking um and so now I've got both it's straight it's doesn't curve anymore but it's straight but it does have some depth to it, so as it goes around, you can see it has some dimension to it you see that light is actually making some nice um highlights on there and we're a quarter resolution. So one thing that's kind of cool though what if I wanted to make that look like it's punching through the back extruded all with less goes something huge like five hundred and have it go all the way through the back there? So now we've got this text, which is looks like it's coming out out of the edge let me go to position here I can key frame key frame this um let's push it back a little first there we go and then at the end of the animation we could have it really pushing out like that so we could have that animate overtime and look like it's actually being pushed out from the surface there and again this they're just they're just texting and in vectors and we put him into three d space and allows you to get some some pretty cool titling effects and, uh, nice motion graphics with really nice simulated three d, with a lot of a lot of flair to it there, so and that's kind of that's, a ce faras. I want to go with the ray trace three d t today. I want to get into some of these other projects. Were showing earlier to kind of pick up where we worth animation, but they do involve three d space. So I wanted to get some of these concepts and his principles down first. So that there's a little understanding there on how all of this all comes together.