Are there any plugins that can do a “writing” text effect automatically?

[Cory Petkovsek]

What is a writing text effect? Load up bridge from your effects panel and browse through the text animation presets.
Cory

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Cory Petkovsek
Corporate Video

[John Cuevas]

I once had to do not one, but multiple projects with animated “written” text that was to appear as it was written on a blackboard. My solution was to animate each letter of the alphabet and the numbers 0-9. Once that was finished I just dragged an dropped them into my final composition, one letter or number at a time.

Was pretty time-consuming, but faster than if I had attempted animating each repeated letter. So that’s one route you could try.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[Joey Foreman]

You could find a good cursive/handwritten font to make your text, precompose that, and in the Layer window use the Eraser tool set to Write On to erase the text backwards from the end of the sentence. Then Time-Reverse the keyframes.

It’s quite tricky and requires many practice runs – and much easier with a tablet.

You also have to tweak the resultant keyframes to get the playback timing right.

By no means an easy solution, but maybe worth a shot.

Joey Foreman
Editor/Compositor/VFX Artist

[David Ghast]

Thats a new one. I tried “converting text to keyframes”, but it didnt work since it outlined the text. Also looked at the roto-brush tool, hoping that i could just write over the text, but it didnt seem to work that way. Ill basically have to make a bezier alphabet and just copy it over one letter at a time. Thanks.

[Robert Headrick]

Here’s another option. This one has the pro of being very easy, but possibly the con of not giving you quite the look you might want. I’ve used it before though, and it’s a nice look.

Select text layer and choose Layer –> Create Masks from Text
On the new Solid that gets created, choose Effect –> Generate –> Stroke
Make sure “All Masks” is checked (by default it’s not)
Change “Paint Style” to “Reveal Original Image”
Starting from 0, increase “Brush Size” slowly until your text looks normal again
Animate “End” from 0 to 100% to make the text draw on
Unchecking “Stroke Sequentially” will change the look so that all the letters draw on at the same time instead of one-by-one

[Ben Mullins]

Robert –

This has just saved me an absolute mass of time! Looks just as good as the Write On effect in my opinion (although I suppose it depends on what you’re doing exactly). Thank you!

[Laurence Yates]

Perhaps too late for the OP, but there is a plugin for this at aescripts called QuickDraw.

I have posted a reply to the following thread with the details: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1024499 or you can go straight to the plugin here: https://aescripts.com/quickdraw

Laurence Yates
Motion Graphics Artist and Illustrator
Creator of QuickDraw – https://aescripts.com/quickdraw/
https://www.notbyhalf.com/

[Yisroel Glick]

Thank you for that, it is a lifesaver. But now I’m stuck. I am just begining to dabble in AE for the first time, and when I tried the stroke –> reveal original with a mask – created from text yesterday it worked perfectly, but now that I am trying it again it seems to be removing the text and just leaving an outline rather than revealing it, and I have no idea what I am doing wrong :/
I am following the instructions to a tee.
Any ideas what it might be?

[Isa De veth]

Hi,

I followed your steps, which were very usefull!
I got one problem: my letters won’t keep their original color and I cant seem to change them back. Any suggestions?

[Andrei Popa]

I used this project from videohive. Really easy to use and solves a lot of time. https://videohive.net/item/animated-handwriting/19414022?s_rank=1