Lessons

Lesson Info

Animating Text & Presets

A typical type of, uh, question is usually asked is, you know, how do I get some of those crazy, you know, things that make text fly in and out and built into after facts is a lot of text presets, animation, presets, and you can find those in the effects and presets panel just by going through there and looking to see what they all do just by applying them. But even better is the preset browser, and you find that up here each panel like this one, uh, has a little menu will panel menu if you click that you'll find there's different functions within that panel. Manya sometimes he access and by just right clicking on the on the layer. But in the panel menu, you've got this one setting called browse presets, and if I open that up, it's goingto open up, uh, bridge and allow us to preview all of these presets, so I've got text preset, since we're in the text world will double click this and I can start going to town in here just looking at what all of these different, uh, presets do. And if ...

I select one takes a second that's loading everything it's going to show me a preview here on the right side and give me the metadata on it so you can see there's a three d type of effect that comes in fact this whole folder is full of three d effects and these air pre canned effects so if I wanted to use this I just double click it and it applies it to my text layer so now I do a ramp review and that's like cheating isn't it that's like cheating that is cheating no it's great because it does give you the the access to it so if I go back to bridge and find another item here let's get out of three d and uh let's do an animate in and here we've got a lot of different options here so they kind of describe what they are plus they show what they are and this is characters shuffling in this's dropping in by character uh fade up by character um course we all know what that is fly in with the twist the cool thing is is these can also be animated on dh modified some so let me find one that might be a good uh good one to try it let's try let's drop in how about that one dropping by character so I double click that that applies to it but now I've got uh I've got two different things applied to so let me clear all of my animators and I should have done that before I did that so get rid of those animations and actually, because it's in three d it's freaking out everything, uh, let me just do this did did it commands? He commands, either we go commands, he is your friend, especially have multiple levels of undue and just like after effects with photo shop, you've got levels on do you go to your preferences and you can change that in your preferences levels of undue by default is thirty two, depending on the type of project I'm working on. Sometimes that may reduce that down to, like fifteen or twelve, but usually not less than that. Because you've gotta have breadcrumbs to get out of where ugo, because you can. You got to really get deep in the rabbit hole here. So let me go back to bridge and I'll apply just that there we go and we see that it's going from the top to the bottom and it's like, well, that doesn't really look like what it showed me in the preview. It came from out of screen. Well, what we can do is make some changes to the animation. So here's, the animator that's, what's really going on here we see there's some little dots down here. Those dots are actually key frames, but the dot means that it's buried inside another layer of something going on. So we have to just keep drilling down we see here the range selector we drill down to that we see okay there's are two key frames that are hidden from us so we can look at the before key frame and that is what's really animating um so we got look through here and see what our position is and see if that helps we can move that up and then we see that it comes down to here there we go and some of this is just a matter of kind of reverse engineering what's in there and when you buy the the training today you also get you know these these functions you'll be able to go in and reverse engineer a lot of what you're seeing on here today but this is also another path you start applying some of thes presets we're going to look at a couple more and see how they're assembled you start learning you know how some of these other tools work the range selector the different animators how they how they're functioning and how you can modify him overtime so that's one thing I could change there's just the the beginning position so it starts off the top of the screen and then it comes down and if I just do a quick ram preview is he okay that comes in what if I wanted to do something else? Well let's see what else do we have in here what are some of our advanced options is there anything in there that uh is editable that we want to mess with probably not on this particular one but I might be able to combine that with speeding it up just by moving my last key freeman's I could speed it up comes in a little faster and I could also go in and change my position over time if I wanted to make it come on screen so I could do this have it like it's coming on so that will be our end sometimes I work backwards I wanted to end there so that's going to be where I put that key frame at the end and then here I want it I need to see it so I'm going to start about here and I want it to be off the screen this is just the start points it's going to kind of fly in from the right okay so that's how I was able to just edit that with a couple key frames changing my beginning position changing um changing the length of time that it comes in and it still looks a little bit you know crazy well it's because we just have to turn on motion blur motion blur smoothes out so much and we see that gives us a little more realism in the way that comes in all right and another thing um with with these settings we've you know course we could get really deep in it to get into more advanced features of dealing with text rewriting some of the the way the wig alors and the animators all work you can add more animation you can animate you're a pass ity everything just like you would if you are too just twirl down you're transformed functions so say we wanted to animate or scale so that it started ah, little bigger and ended up smaller so we could do that. Um come out here like a big so looks like it's flying in more it gives you a little more of an effect that it's coming in from over your shoulder and we're doing all that still into d so hasn't we haven't even gotten into, uh, any three d text yet? So um let's see here let's look at a couple of their animators and a couple different animation techniques here, let me actually start with some fresh text some fresh texting. You, uh I had showed you the uh first way of getting text onto the screen and that was to just add a text layer. You could just grab the type tool up here and then just a click away and just type something in there so just by clicking in the middle of my cop was able to add a text later so I'm going to drag that down to the centre here going to move my anchor point let me see where is my anchor point on this it's probably at the base there go over there and then grab it center it I've got it there um like like we did in the other ones you can animate just you're transformed functions we can go back and look at a couple other of these process that aaron the bridge and see if we can deconstruct how some of them are working uh let's look at something else besides our animal in let's look at some of these here like organic what are these doing? See that's actually doing a kind of a fly in at the same time I kind of tweaked the last one to do something similar to that although I didn't have a rotating as it came in um this one does something a little more floating on organic uh let's see what else we have to work with that one's kind of fun to um you can you can just have a lot of fun just going through these presets and seeing what's in there yeah let's find something that would be good anime let's see this one that might be a little more than what we wanted take tackle fish bait that one's got a weekly in there let's use this one. Okay, that was just flying her it's not really moving around it's just wiggling the text so let's open it up and see what it's doing is here we've got two different things here we've got its animating it skew and it's got another animator I don't see any pre set key frames in here let's look at our range selector and see what's happening here so this's typical any of these animations say we didn't want this to start off animating we didn't want it to start animating toe like a second out. Well, I could have clicked the stopwatch for the end and I could turn that from one hundred down to zero and that will just kind of that should well, that one didn't really freeze it probably have to come down here and do this as well. I've got two different animators going on same time here, so a few different ways I could do this I could change. Um I could change the amount from here so my minimum amount my maximum amount I could change those by just clicking. The stop watch is on backing off and setting in both two zero there we go so then it takes off so we could in effect create something like blades of grass or something let's call it okay and let's give it a color we've got our little color fill color panel over here you can give it a green color because we want to look like grass so we could animate you know, some wind blowing on it and they could all move like little blades of grass so just to give you some ideas of the different things you could do there that s o a studio modern asks is there a way to apply this presets to objects other than text? There are a lot of animation presets in the the in the browser here we go to bridge way look in our pre sets here we've got different um different things for different backgrounds you've got these all come with the the shipping version of the product uh different distortion effects that could be applied to different things if we look at those samal some crazy things sums are faded, faded, ends something and does a quick flash distortions warps things like that? Um this does different color presets there pretty generic they're basically adding cem cem different uh some different postal ization coloring effects and that kind of thing to it shapes presets yeah, I see here we've got some animated sprites so these air shapes and we're going to get into shapes more tomorrow uh animating vectors and that type of thing in some of these air preset shape so those air animated vectors so so yes to answer that question you khun do some some different presets and then of course it'll animation uh things that you can code in there and make him work so um looking at the looking at the different presets in here um we can tweak them animate and reverse engineer um change the timing on um build different things with them and that is really cool stuff so I'm going to just delete these animators get our text back here we actually do have a question about presets from modesto okay um would like to know when you put a preset on a text how do you extend the length of time it stays on after the motion has taken place well that that's a good question let's address that before we move on so let me go back to my text presets we'll add one to it and notice there's some that say animate inanimate out um different kinds of all different kinds of pre sets but he animate in a pre set you can also animate out by playing with key frames so let's take a look here let's say this is a slow fade on let's take that one's pretty simple and that actually applied it to didn't have my layer selected so it's like the layer now double click it there we go so see that that says that's fading on in about two seconds so if I didn't want it to fade on that quick I find where my key frames are arrange selector and in this case I could just move those key frames out and it won't start till he gets to that point see oops here we go grand preview there um if I want teo animate that back out within the same animation just reverse what it did I could just grab one of these key frames here, grab it copy it paste that's going to just keep it in that place copy this one come out here paste that's going to go back so if I ran preview that whole thing it will come up, stay on and then go back away and I did that without having apply any other uh functions to it just changing key frames great. So um that's with ease in our little animators there let's actually let's go back a couple here and get rid of it there we go. I said I was going to touch on uh a little bit of three d and that's what I'd like to do here let me get rid of this column going to hide it. So we got a little more of our space here and let me get uh a little boulder fought here get changed us again and let's make this orange orange e just because I felt like it I didn't have a selected you gotta select the layer before it will do what you want here we go all right and she will bring this back bring that back out all right so now I've got this um this layer is just text there's nothing special to it other than that I want to make it three d where I could do something else with it there's a couple things I need to do one is first I gotta click this little box here says make it three d and now that means that I will have more options uh in uh creating creating space for this for doing some different things with it you'll see that our position we've got a third row now which is r z position we've got it for anchor point position, scale orientation and our rotations so if I was to rotate this now and three d space you can see that I'm doing that with it just by cycling the rotation now how what how you deal with three d space we're gonna get into this more tomorrow when we get into three d a lot more but you think of x y and z are you different axes x it moves along the horizontal and I'd like to think of excess like an axle on a car it'll rotate this way and it's the horizontal axis uh z uh z rotation is vertical but it's it's it's it's not really well it doesn't spin vertical but it's it's in a space that comes to you so take it back. Why is vertical and z is the depth or where it is in relation to u s o if you look at that access, if I, uh, we'll rotate our long it, it will rotate like I've got a pin stuck in it, and I'm just spinning it like a propeller, so but the why is around the vertical axis is like a pole, and you think of it like a merry go round like, why did I get on this thing? So that's typically how I remember it, I usually start it. Why was like, why? Okay, no, I don't want it, I want it so that's, how I always remember my taxis and special with rotation so you can see that you can move stuff along that space. Um, one thing I do have to look at here, though, is what we're going to get into more tomorrow in three d is there's two different ways of dealing with three d space in after effects there's the classic three d, which is basically three dimensional space, which allows you to move stuff around in, and it allows you to move like flat pieces of stuff around in there, so if you remember talking about our layers of plastic with stuff on the plastic think of those in the same way but think of them this way pieces of glass or plastic and you can move them around in three d space you have all these objects so they could be there like a little cutouts our photographic images or videos or whatever you think of them moving in the space but after they came out with six they offered the ray trace three d which you just converted you just not converted be actually, uh access that through the panel here it's only go back and show you that again cause I kind of went off for a second there it says okay it's god think about it, okay? You find that up here in the upper right of your comp it'll say which render it'll either say classic three d or it'll say ray trace three d and you change it right here was his render you can select classic or ray trays, so we're just going to stay with ray traced for now actually just changed it to retrace and now we'll notice there's something extra here called geometry and then we have geometry options to our text, so I click that layer and eye opening this up and we see we've got bevel and, uh, different extrusion capabilities here, so if I look at my bevel style we've got three different kinds you've got angular, which is like a chisel just a straight chiseled edge or chiseled bever like a sham for, uh you've got con cave where it's actually dipped in like somebody take a router to the edges or you've got convex, which is, you know, curved and smooth kind like the edges of apple products are all, uh, convex, so I'm going to select convex and I'm going teo select my extrusion depth and crank that out a bit and right now it doesn't look like much it just looks like it's blobby er and so you have to kind of gum, okay, why is that? Well, that's because it's actually extruding, but we don't have a three d light to bounce off from it, so if I don't have, you know, a three d light it's just going to it's going to look flat, you know, light bounces off from edges of objects and we need that light tio to show us what yeah, what the edges were the highlights were the shadows where all of that isthe so what we have to do is add a light and we're going to go to a new light and I'm just going to pick a spotlight because that's going to give me what I'm really looking for leave it at one hundred, one hundred percent intensity on leaving everything else in here I am going to click this thing worse his cast shadows though click that because I wanted to be able to cast shadows not necessarily on something else but I wanted to cast shadows on itself so if I move the light to the side you can see here in a minute some of these letters will cast shadows on other characters, so we'll do that uh give it a little diffusion because again we're faking it this isn't real three d in the sense that it's emulating the rural world it's kind of faking it kind like we do with layer styles you know we fake our drop shadows we share, you know fake are devils and bossing and it's all fake so we have to fake our shadows to which means that ah shadow falling off from this text on a plane that's here and say we've got our text here and there's a plane there's the light the shadow will have the same intensity in diffusion falling on this plane is it will if I had another plane clear out here so you have to really plan ahead for this stuff and know that it's it's not going to really be varied that much so anyway I'm just going to say twenty five click okay takes it a minute to think about it and here's my light I can grab it and I could move it up and back and would let it update here there we go now let me go toe like fifty percent here and then if I change my resolution two half I'm at fifty percent it's pretty much one toe once I'm gonna have a nice clean render I don't need it to think any harder than it already is for this so let me move this down and I might be able to pull this light up just a little more notice I'm moving only in the x axis because I happen to click right when I was clicking on the x arrow so I want to click somewhere out here that grabs it without clicking any of those little colored arrows that way I can freely move my spotlight around so by moving my spotlight up and out I can get a little better idea of what it's doing on these letters zoom in a little bit here things start to see the bengals beveled edges here he start seeing the shadows inside so zoom back out okay, so being that I can see what my uh extrusion looks like now because I've got a light I can come back down here and start playing with things like the bevel uh, size so I can make it a little bigger um change my extrusion depth I could make it really thick or make it thinner bringing it down okay, so those things believe it or not can be animated overtime because again we got stopwatches next to him so I could have the bevel grow over time if I wanted to so I don't have to just animate the text around on the page I can make some of the elements of the the text itself animate overtime so I could actually have this grow out off you know hardly anything go down to zero so all we have is the face the surface which is thie bevel depth so I could start it there and out here in a second I could have it go to, like five hundred and it's going to make a longer actually let's make it clear that five five thousand it's making extreme okay, all right. And to really be able to see that let's rotate uh in the ex access we'll tip it down just a little bit nuts has trouble uh there we go a little bit more that a little bit more that way there you go now I can zoom back out fit I can see what I'm looking at and I've just got one light on this thing so I can add more lights and cameras and things like that we could get into in a minute but what I can do since that is growing from that let's save this and do a in a habit of saving so if you see a little command us on there I can dictate that so actually, let me call this three d tech so if something happens we'll have it. Okay? All right, so let's do a little ramp review here should go quick did you needed to do and it's actually going beyond the reach of the like is it still rendering? So I've got it going away back there okay, so you can see pretty fast, but it's it's it's functional. So if I want to see where that animation is in here remember, we look for the little round dots here, which is like right there I know there's a key frame in there so I want to slow down that animation I can bring that out. I can also make it a little less dramatic. I kind of went overboard there with five thousands let's just make it one thousand and that falls off the side. They're so now it should render well faster and be less less of a fast movement so she kind of grow that way. Ok, well, it's rendering do we have any more questions popping in on this kind of diving into three d here that there's I mean that's a world we could live in for three days absolutely, yeah, we actually did have a question um s o rk asks can we animate the position of light over time? Almost definitely and we're going to be getting into more three d animation because that's really where the magic lives is in the three d world the nice thing is this is in after effects you can animate a bunch of stuff in to tea then bring that in as a subcompact and have those animations going on inside three d and you can just go really pretty crazy with it all um and we're going to get into something crazy over the next two days so we'll definitely be animating the light and adding a cup more lights here in a second I just wanted to see if we actually see that move but you see it's kind of like an extrusion like the the text is actually coming out at us and if we combined that with physical motion of the text coming out at us then we can kind of fake again it's all about faking things we can fake are uh the illusion that the text is is kind of growing out toward us so what I would do here is lock my position on the end a lot of times you build something you like how it looks this is where I want it to land this is this is the you know the final shot this is where I want it to be and I start there a build that and that's where I set all my key frames and then all of my animation I start working backwards going oh is that enough? Is that gonna work or is that too much and so that's where I would work that so that animation there c we're gonna actually start start it from here that's where we'll start it then out here hey scroll down from me key frames I can line them up and position here I'm going to bring it toward me so that's negative space and I can see that I'm going into the shadows so what I do for a quick fix like this where I really want it to be hot with one spotlight but still be visible is the first thing I'll do is add another light laywer new light and maybe add a little ambient light type of light ambient light and I bring the intensity down a bit maybe thirty five percent it doesn't it doesn't cast shadows so you don't have to worry about that but it will kind of light some other things up because there's no speculator information in the ambient light it just kind of feels in shadows so that's a good first step so what that is's fills in my shadows how much of that do I want it toe to fill in going there pull that down maybe make it like fifteen percent okay and then see how that looks that's good that way my shadows aren't pitch dark they're just filled in a bit and now what I would do ismay be animate this other light here so as I get into um my three d space a little more here open this up a bit let's get rid of our guides. We don't need those anymore show guides and command are to get rid of the rulers. Um what I like to do is have more angles to look at when I'm building something in three d a a lot of times you're you're busy working on something you go I just want to look above for a minute but I don't want to change my entire view around just want to look above with a couple things you could do. You've got one view here and right now I don't have a camera built in and three d space probably not going to go to that extreme today but the act of camera is just the built in live view here it's a couple of custom views you can look at this custom view one which gives you a kind of a bird's eye view here custom view too these air presets most of them are kind of looking down so we can see from three different views we can't look directly from top and we can look, you know, from left and right, but what I like to do so I can see everything all at once as I go here from one view and I go to four views and that gives me four different views of my animation so here I want to say I want this one here see how when I click on it it don't know why my guides air still showing here so get clear the guy it's but by guides so this one here see there there's four little yellow triangles in the box here that means that is the act of view that is the one that I'm focused on. That is the one that if I was to render this right now it would only see that view wouldn't see all the others, but it also tells me that's the one you've selected that's the box he selected what've you do you wanna have? I want that to be my main view that's my active camera that's the one that we're going to be looking at and I'm going to expand this out a little more so we get a little more space here to see our our views here we go all right, so uh that's my main view, this one here I would probably is that stop this one is front let's make that, uh left okay. And then this one I could select maybe one of the custom custom view one some looking above. So what I want to do is animate this light and reposition this light overtime again. It's just key frames. So nothing to get afraid of, uh, just go down to my, uh, transformed functions here. I need a little more space than I could get the resolution of this monitor, so we'll have to kind of go back and forth a bit here. So I am going to animate my position, so I'll start with it right where it is at the very beginning. Because I like that first view where's highlighting the edges really nicely. So going to click my position stopwatch and then come out here a couple seconds when we start losing it and see how far out do we go? We go a full five seconds. We stop for looks like we stopped somewhere around three and a half. So at this point, we can see that the extrusion in the movement of the text has gone outside or it's actually in front of the spotlight. So a couple things I could do. I could either animate where the spotlight is pointing or keep the spotlight pointing. Uh in its original destination and just moved the spotlight so looking at it in this view uh, this custom view I can see where it is I can just kind of pull it out and bring it around front and I guess my space bar to give me a little more real estate, okay? And I can see the update here this is why I like to work in multiple views in three d because I can see what the tools air doing where they're pointing where they're moving and I get to see the final life update in the in the window there so I can see it comes up there and the light moves along with it so when I want to go back to just seeing that I go back to just one view and this will be my act of camera view there we go so do a quick ram preview and that may take about thirty seconds because there's a lot going on in there all right? This is just about rendered enough that I'm happy with it to see where it's going so we're seeing the extrusion the text is coming at us, we're seeing the light moving on it and you don't notice the light moving as much as it's just making the text come alive a little more on the front end now one thing we didn't really cover yet is our material options so if I look at it will that up twelve this down and we've dealt with geometry but we haven't really dealt with our material options yet and by default thie three d elements in after effects are set to off for casting shadows I don't know why it's been that way since day one and so if I turned that on I'm going to see the shadows are little more pronounced because they were us going where are all of my shadows they should be creating shadows on each other and that helps you position your lights too so you can really maximize where your shadows are falling so we can see now that the shadows are indeed going on there by default the except shadows is on accepts lights is on appears in reflections is on we're going to get into that in the next couple of days because that takes a little more planning and pre processing then we've got to do it building from scratch live here I could because its reflections take a lot of rendering power so I kinda have to show you how to make the settings will render one frame and then show you the finished the finished cake coming out of the oven like julia child's right? So we're gonna be doing a lot more of that in the next couple days because some of this stuff takes a long time to really get the animations going um so we've got reflections we've got what they have metal and if you turn that down then that flattens everything out it kind of takes the life out of the reflectivity ofyour texture of your text or whatever three d element is that you have, so bringing that up brings it a little more of a metallic look. Yeah, a speculum highlights are a little stronger, the color's a little more intense uh, speculum shining us who can crank that up and some of these you just kinda gotta play with and see, you know what they do? Okay? I wanted to look a little more shiny. Er a little more plasticky. So you start playing with some of these and, uh, if you've got transparency, you've got refraction where it actually distorts what youre looking through, we could go on and on in three d world, but I just wanted to sweeten up this a little more and see how it works, being able to actually see the shadows. So now we can see the shadows of some of these letters falling on each other. The insides of the letters are actually casting a shadow within themselves, and it's got a little more believable three d feel to it that render just a little bit more so we didn't have somebody that mentioned, um derek film blawg asks is what's the difference in creating a three d title in photo shop and then transferring it over to after effects rather than just creating the three d text and after effects well, your limitations of creating something elsewhere are how do they translate to the three d world in after effects he creates something in three d and photoshopped the only way you can bring it out is to have a non animated but rendered uh and bring it over and hopefully retained transparency again that's one that I'm not sure if it will do that from three d I know it older versions it didn't, but I haven't tried it yet with photo shop cc yet to see if transparency has retained on a three d object um, but if you were to render something, you'd have to render it out completely and then bring it in just like it's a piece of footage or animation so you could do it that way but you don't have any control the lights won't interact with it, it won't interact with other three d layers in that type of thing and that's why I was going to show you here is that if I have another layer in there that will these shadows will then cast onto that other layer the other three d taxed could collide with this or actually, you know, kind of smash through it um and that's, where some of your interactivity really lies, you could have this text kind of go through a plane like it's uh, you know, like it's liquid in a sense, it just kind of flows right through it. So you're interactivity between riel three d layers are really simulated three d that's, like, really simulated leather, a real simulated wood grain eso but keeping everything in their own environment is how it works and as I'll get into when I talk about three d using cinema forty, the problem there is again, you can only use it in classic three d mode. It won't work with this so I can take, like a three d model in cinema forty bring it in here have this sweet, you know, text you doing its thing on the same, you know, plain and having to interact in any way I would have to treat this like I would in animation, done somewhere else, or you did after pre render it or sub competent or do something to make it work. Um, that would allow itself to work in my composite, so long answer to a short question, but it's but it isn't a simple answer, unfortunately, so, yes, I was wondering, can you do when you combine two to d layers? For example for a and video in three d in after facts alright, yes and we're going to get into that because I have that what happens when you bring in either a solid layer solid you know a solid object laywer whether that's a photo and illustration video layer whatever ah and you bring it into the ray trace three d mode you've got the option of bending it so it has it bands along one one access so you can bend it curve it so that works in this environment as well or just leave it flat like a flat plane so would move in like this and my tax too he'll be here s o u can move things around in three d space that way but there's still two d kind of tootie elements but you can make them three d by bending them to be showing you that as well. So for example let me just throw in a quick layer here and do a solid layer and let's make it um let's make it kind of ah light light light blue okay since it's a two d layer it just kind of takes over and we have to convert it to three d turn on three d let it catch up has to think about a new object in the scene there ago okay, so here we go so now we can make this look like it's actually busting through the wall here a zit goes again it's on a totally separate plane from the text being see how the text is interacting with it just updating it a little bit here we do have a question from confucius jones um can you show us a real world example of animating a multilayered photoshopped file and after effects he has a three layered file and he wants to give it some motion so we'll be getting into that tomorrow for sure yes, I've got a lot of good examples on that because again that is that's kind of what we did earlier on I showed you the little coffee cup thing at the very beginning is a teaser that's one of our projects that we'll be getting into tomorrow on dh it is just again it's a matter of taking layers from whatever app you're you're working in and long as they translate his layers here they retain the transparency around each object on the layer and you can animate them you can animate him in three d you can animate him into d and and that's really cool but especially if you're doing within three d on to keep them all on the same plane then you can at least use lights and shadows and have him fall and drop another three d objects and elements so that's very very handy