Computer type write effect

[Todd Morgan]

Just a thought… duplicate your text layer, replace all the text with “_” making sure you set the same number of characters. Set your range to the first letter and animate the range moving down the way so it is offset from your animated text reveal in the other layer.

Todd Morgan
morgancreative

[Tom Hepburn]

I might be missing the question a bit, but what I would do is:

Create a blinking cursor in a comp (as long as you need for the “master comp”)
Then I would just create the whole text/sentence with glow or whatever you want ot simulate the look
bring both into a “master Comp:”
animate a mask to reveal the computer text.
animate the cursor’s position or anchor to follow the revealing type.

As I say I might be misunderstanding the question, but that is what I would do.

T

[Mike]

This is what I’ve done to achieve this effect before:

1. Create a layer with your type.
2. Create a grey solid and make a thin rectangular mask in the shape you want for the cursor.
3. Create a white solid and make a rectangular mask that starts just to the left of your cursor and has enough width and height to cover up all of your text (you are going to use this as a track matte to reveal your text)
4. Parent the white solid to the cursor.
5. Move the cursor layer (which now has the white solid parented to it) to the beginning of your text line.
6. Create position keyframes for the cursor just after each letter of text and space the keyframes to whatever length of time feels good to you to have the line typed.
7. Turn each keyframe into a hold keyframe so that After Effects won’t interpolate any of the inbetween movement, but will just snap the cursor layer to each keyframe position.
8. Lastly – place your white solid layer above your text layer and turn on alpha matte for the text layer.

Since the text will be revealed by the white track matte layer and each of your keyframes are set to hold keyframes for your cursor layer, this gives the illusion that each layer is popping up just to the left of the cursor – as would happen in the “real world”. You can also keyframe the opacity of your cursor layer if you’d like to create any blinking effects. I have used this numberous times for type and it works out great. Good luck!

[Paulo Mateus]

Very good ways for doing it, you really helped me a lot.

Thanks to you all guys!

Paulo Mateus

[Terry Coolidge]

What version of After Effects do you have? Do you have a version since the introduction of text animation presets? Under “Mechanical text animation presets” there is one called “Underscore” that behaves in a way very similar to what you are describing. I’ve actually used this one on several different occasions to get the effect you seem to be looking for.

[Tyler Paul]

When I was into qbasic programming there was a very useful command that allowed you to look at just the first, last, or middle charecters of a string. Is this available in Java, or AE for that matter? It would be great for creating the typing effect via expressions.

[Gimmel]

Put the following code into the Sourcetext expression. Use a slider to animate n.
Isn’t that easy?

n=8;
showtext=text.sourceText.substr(0,n)+”_”;

[Barry Suydam]

n=8;
showtext=text.sourceText.substr(0,n)+”_”;

I used this code and it on accident gave me exactly what i needed. Thanks. What I was looking for was to have text type on inversely to normal. Usually you type in a linear fashion…what I was looking for was for each letter to push the previous letters index away from the words anchor point. so if a word is right justified it types out to the left but from its right justified anchor point. Confused yet? Sorry

Your code did this perfectly, however when doing the exact opposite the text types on like usual.(Left justified typed out one letter after the other…unwanted) Any way to duplicate the wanted behavior would be much appreciated.