Linking a shape layer to a text

[Dan Ebberts]

I would do it with a script, using sourceRectAtTime() to get the width of the text and adjust the width of the shape layer accordingly.

There is a hack to do it with expressions, using sampleImage() to get the left and right bounds of the text, but doing that on hundreds of layers would really slow things down.

Dan

[Karl Lidh]

Thank you for the reply, since I dont know that much about scripting, what would a script like that look like?

Karl

[Dan Ebberts]

How you navigate to the layers depends a lot on the structure of your project and your naming convention for comps and layers and would make up a good part of the script. Once you get to a text layer and the corresponding shape layer, it would look something like this:

var myRect = myTextLayer.sourceRectAtTime(0,true);
var myHorizScale = (myRect.width/myShapeLayer.width)*100;
myShapeLayer.property(“Scale”).setValue([myHorizScale,100]);

Dan

[Kevin Camp]

i have a method that i have used to do something similar, that may work for you too…

duplicate the text layer (maybe name it ‘underline’), and use the expression pickwhip to link that layer’s source text to the source text of the original text layer.

now apply fast blur and set it to repeat edge pixels and crank up the blur until you get a nice even color, then you can apply simple choker or some alpha correction effect to make it fully opaque if needed.

this should give you a solid ‘bar’ that is the size of the text. adjust the scale and position to create the ‘underline’.

if you really wanted, you can do this with a single layer… after the choker effect, apply the transform effect to do the scale and repositioning; cc repetile adjusting the ‘up’ property and setting tiling to ‘none’; and then cc composite, unchecking rgb only to composite the text back in. then it can be saved as a preset — whoohoo!

anyway, i hope that can help you out.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

one thing that could interfere with this method is descenders… i had used this with all caps, but since this method will ‘fill’ the area that has type in it fairly tightly, the height will be effected by descenders and that may cause problems.

also the one layer method will have some issues too due to the way text layers create anchorpoints… sorry about that. i was just playing around with it and it gets pretty tweaky.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Armand Verhoeven]

Hi Dan,

I also try to do this method on my text animations.
But I can’t figure out where to put this expression.

On the Scale of the shapelayer or the Size of the rectangle Path?
Tried both but didn’t work tho..

Thank you in advance 🙂

Regards,
Armand
The Netherlands

[Dan Ebberts]

That’s a snippet of code you would put in a script, not an expression.

Dan

[James North]

Hiya

Im trying to learn how to do this for a university assignment & crazy stuck…I understand a lot of AE, but nothing about linking & scripting…

Is there a video tutorial or anything for this? Or an example project I can download?

Thank you,
James 😀