• Adobe After Effects

  Randomly dispersed text characters that animate into a solid word.

  Posted by Jim Hopper on August 17, 2017 at 3:41 pm

  OK so I hope I can describe this clearly.
  I have a sentence of text that I want all the individual letters to be randomly dispersed with 0 opacity.
  The letters will slowly fade in as they come together to form a word. At that point their opacity will be 100.

  I created outlines from my text layer but have been trying to find SOME way to animate from scattered letters back to a solid word.

  Any ideas?

  Jim Hopper replied 9 years ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Kevin Camp

  August 18, 2017 at 8:45 pm

  pretty easy with a text animator…

  I’ll start with position:

  • twirl down the text options for the text layer that you want to animate, click the arrow button next to the the word ‘animate’ and choose ‘position’ from the menu list.
  • from the ‘add’ menu next to ‘animator 1’ that was just created, choose selector>wiggly.
  • in the ‘position’ property below the wiggly selector enter a value (like 500,500), this will be the number of pixels that the letters will be dispersed. the letters should be pretty random now, and if you scrub the timeline, they should be swarming around.
  • to get control of the swarm, twirl down the wiggly selector and key frame the max amount to go from 100% to 0% and the min amount to go from -100% to 0%. the letters should now fly around and then come together to form a word.

  for the opacity, you can simply animate the opacity property for the text layer to go from 0 to 100%.

  or, if you wanted the letters to start appearing one by one, you could use a second animator:

  • select the text layer name, then click the animate menu again, choosing ‘opacity’ this time. you should get a second animator, if not delete the opacity property from the first animator, select the layer name and try again.
  • set that opacity value to 0
  • twirl down the range selector properties, and key frame the offset to go from 0 to 100%.
  • if you want the characters to appear randomly vs in order, twirl down the advanced properties and set ‘random order’ to on.

  Kevin Camp
  Art Director
  KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW
• 

  Jim Hopper

  August 18, 2017 at 9:16 pm

  Brilliant! Thanks so much. I often forget how many tools are available in just the Animate… section of a text layer.
  Thanks!

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