• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Simple Text Expression

  Posted by Lloyd Ernest on September 10, 2014 at 12:17 pm

  Hi there

  I’m trying to create an animation for text where each character shuffles one place to the right, frame by frame – so it becomes a sort of slider. Hoping to achieve something similar to the text in this video –

  https://youtu.be/yrQiR-v-KRk?t=6s

  I’ve been told that I can do this with some Expressions code in the Source Text property, coupled with keyframing/Expression in the Position property – unsure however how to go about doing this / what code is needed.

  Any help/recommendations would be very much appreciated.

  Thanks very much

  Lloyd

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  Lloyd Ernest replied 12 years ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Kevin Camp

  September 10, 2014 at 3:53 pm

  your link didn’t seem to work, so i couldn’t see your example, but what i think you are looking for can be achieved with a text animator.

  try this: twirl down the text layer properties, click on the ‘animate’ menu to the right of the text property and choose position from that menu.

  adjust the x value of the animator’s position property to move the text line the amount needed.

  then twirl down the range selector for that animator and animate the either the end property or the offset property. the effect should be that each character, one by one, should slide by the amount set in the x value.

  is that the movement you were looking for?

  Kevin Camp
  Art Director
  KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW
• 

  Lloyd Ernest

  September 10, 2014 at 4:33 pm

  Hi Kevin – thanks very much for your reply.

  That’s a that’s a bit different to what I’m going for unfortunately – I’ve fixed the link now so you should be able to see the video.

  As you can see it’s very similar to the “Character Offset” animator but instead of having random characters I’m trying to keep the word the same but just move each character one to the right (and then repeat) – such as this

  ONLOND (start animation)
  DONLON
  NDONLO
  ONDONL
  LONDON (end animation)

  Any further help would be fantastic.

  Lloyd
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  September 10, 2014 at 6:45 pm

  This isn’t exactly what you want, but it should give some ideas about how you can manipulate text strings:

  txt = “LONDON”;
  framesPerPos = 4;
  f = timeToFrames(time – inPoint);
  idx = Math.floor(f/framesPerPos);
  if (idx < txt.length)
  txt.substr(idx+1) + txt.substr(0,idx+1)
  else
  txt

  Dan
• 

  Lloyd Ernest

  September 10, 2014 at 11:39 pm

  Cheers Dan much appreciated, will give that a go.

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