Making text jiggle/wiggle

[Kevin Camp]

i don’t think this will be as easy as you may have hoped, and i hope you are some what familiar with expressions, because i think you will be using them a lot for this, particularly if there is a lot of text that needs to collide and bounce and jiggle….

i would start by checking out dan ebbert’s collision detection expression or proximity detection expression on motionscript.com. you’ll need something like one of those to have the text interact with each other… those expressions are designed to effect either opacity or color, so they would ned modification to effect direction.

then for the wiggle and jiggle you should look at dan’s physical simulation expressions, towards the bottom of the page are some examples that show a bouncing ball that deforms as it bounces. an expression like this could be used, but it would need to be triggered by collision event.

this will be tricky but it should be able to be worked out, and you can get a lot of help on the after effects expressions forum… but give a good look at those examples to see if you want to get this deep into expressions and physical simulations.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Mike Clasby]

I don’t use text animators much, but this seems to do what you want.

Twirl down the text (I’m assuming you used the Text Tool)..

Click the Animate triangle,choose Position.

Add this expression to the Position Stopwatch, under Animator 1>Range Selector 1, (Copy the expression, Alt-Click that Position Stopwatch, Paste, click outside the box):

wiggle(5,25)

Now the text as a unit has jiggle. change the 5, frequency, or the 25, magnitude, as needed.

To get each letter to jiggle separately, this is as close as I can get… change these settings:

Twirl down Range Selector>Advanced and change the Shape from Square to Triangle. Now up above a bit, change the Ease High to 50%.

I’m not an expert at getting the individual letters to react.

Or you could also put each letter as it’s own layer and give them a different wiggle, change the 5, 25, that would give you maximum individuality.

[Hig116]

Well, it looks like Kevin has the right idea. I will do some research and figure this out. Mikes idea will work but not look as realistic.

So I am off to educate myself. Thanks.

[Benjamin Graham]

I’ve been lurking for awhile but I see this hasn’t been answered adequately so I thought I could offer something. Okay inter collision stuff I haven’t the foggiest on but I think this will do what you need. (even though this is years outdated someone else might need an answer to this, I did)

okay what you need to do is create your text then with the text layer selected got to

– animate >> animate text >> position
– animate >> animate text >> rotation

now find the animator1 or whatever it’s called attribute in that text layer select it

– animate >> add text selector >> wiggly

This stacks itself above your position and rotation attributes (it did in my comp haven’t tested that this happens every time but if yours doesn’t work it might be worth checking that it’s in the right place).

– Now add an expression to position and rotation ie alt click the stop watch I used:

wiggle(10,15) I found more wiggle on rotation than translation looked nicer but thats a preference thing.

The first paramater designates frequency and the second is magnitude, you can add a third for time I think so that it doesn’t run the whole time.

Hope this helps any people confused by this. I was at first.

[Jerimy Brown]

Thank you for this… It was super helpful for me ;).

[Garry Molero]

this worked for me but its like the first letter of each word doesn’t much animation
any ideas?