Is it possible to make AE treat graphics as texts?

[Filip Vandueren]

choose Layer -> Convert to Editable text.

but: This can only be done for non-rasterized text from Photoshop PSD-files:

[Mylenium]

[evrard] “How can i make AE treat my graphic elements as text so that i can use the text animations presets to animate them?”

You can’t. They are completely different things. If you use Photoshop text, you can use Filips suggestion, but that’s it.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Mike Clasby]

Question for Filip and Mylenium.

Can you make your own font? There must be a way, methinks, then you can make your graphics into your own wingdings and AE sees it as text. No?

[Filip Vandueren]

I was just thinking the same,

“Doable” but hardly a quick fix-around 😉

[David Bogie]

Yes, there are several font creation apps.
versiontracker only lists two for the Mac: FontLab and the venerable Fontographer.

It’s generally easier to learn how to apply the effects and expressions contained within the text presets than it is to create one’s own font.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Evrard Blom]

Hopefully one of the AE new releases offers this possibility. Such wonderful animations need to be applied to more than texts.

[Mylenium]

[evrard] ”
Hopefully one of the AE new releases offers this possibility. Such wonderful animations need to be applied to more than texts.”

Umm, no. Actually I believe you’re having a very big misunderstanding here. Text layers work specifically because of the features and nature of fonts, most importantly for:

a) them being vector-based
b) having per-glyph/ per-character attributes which can be used

Even other vectort art could not be animated this way – a simple solid has no spacing, no baseline, no stroke and so on. All those features need to be implemented specifically, meaning they are a separate part of the rendering pipelien as is the case with text layers.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Mylenium]

[yikesmikes] “Can you make your own font?”

Yes, you can and if you’re strictly sticking to dingbats, it’s probably okay to give it a try. I wouldn’t use a dedicated font tool for that, though. They are far too specific and confront you with too many problems. CorelDraw has a very simple way of saving your graphical elements into a TrueType font file for later use, which is probably the simplest way for people rooted in the graphics industry.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl