• Adobe After Effects

  Text Animation

  Posted by Chris Olerich on August 1, 2008 at 10:30 pm

  I was wondering if anyone could help with this problem I am having. I have a bunch of text, broken into single lines and separated onto different layers. The text is all one to two words representing different search categories that my client deals with (ie:”Auto Buyers” “Single Moms” etc…)

  The client has requested that each line of text comes into the screen randomly and fades out. The text will overlap each other in certain cases, but will ultimately be legible.

  What I want to do is find a simple way to have each layer come on the screen, have movement, and fade out, however, with 74 layers, I don’t want to do it by hand, and I can’t have it take up more than 7-10 seconds.

  I imagine that there will be around 20-30 different things on the screen at once, which is fine, as you won’t need to read them all, but I need to figure out some sort of coherent way to have them all moving at once. I was thinking that perhaps making them all sprites and having them controlled by a particle generator would work, or using expressions to drive them randomly, but my knowledge of those things is shaky at best. This project needs to be done soon, so any help would be appreciated.

  Thanks!

  Mike Clasby replied 18 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Mike Clasby

  August 2, 2008 at 1:59 am

  I’d try Dan’s 3D Particle generator tut, here:

  https://library.creativecow.net/articles/ebberts_dan/particle_gen.php

  1) Download the project file and tweak the expressions. Apply expressions to your text.
  2) Move a 3D camera so the text flies in the way you want.
  3) And Here’s a script to make the text to layers easy.

  Details:

  1) The comp named “Fountain” should do what you want with a little modifications of the expressions.

  Delete all but one or two particle, fix the expression until you get what you want. Then you can either Edit>Copy Expression Only and Paste that onto as many text layers as you want, or you can make a preset of the expressions to apply that to as many layers as you want easily.

  Choose one of the “star flare.tga” layers and hit “ee” on the keyboard, exposing the expressions.

  1) I changed the first two lines of the Point expression to:

  lmin = 3.5; //minimum particle life
  lmax = 5.5; //maximum particle life

  This controls the time for particle life.

  For the position expression I changed line 1 to:

  g=0; //gravity

  and line 8 to:

  d=1.4; //drag coeffecient

  Note: You can change the maximum/minimum initial velocities (lines 4 and 5) and the launch angles (lines 6 and 7) in the Position Expression.

  For Scale, I changed the first line to:

  max_scale=100; //maximum scale

  And I turned off the Z Rotation expression (click the equal sign).

  2) I then took Dan’s camera and rotted it so the particles, er text files by the camera. Use the Camera Rotation Tool “C”.

  Tweak the expressions so the particles/text files by and fades out as needed.

  3) Also, for putting lots of text onto separate layers, there is a script named “crg_Text_from_File.jsx “, here:

  https://www.crgreen.com/aescripts/ie/

  Download it and put it in your AE script folder, then fire up AE and File>Run Script>crg_Text_from_File.jsx. It needs to pull the text from a .txt file. Very handy.

  I kinda cranked this answer out quickly, so ask if your lost but interested in more detail.

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