Per-Character Animation Bug?

[Mark Walczak]

Hi everyone,

So, I’ve recently started unlocking the awesome features of After Effects that allow one to animate individual characters of text. I have noticed one annoying attribute, that could be a bug? Say I have the word “creative” on screen, and want to animate each character going up in “y” over time. I will usually add a positional animator to each character, and then work from there. I have noticed, however, that by the time I need to animate the letter “a” or “t,” I need to really crank up my positional values. For instance, if I want all of the letters to reach the same height, I’ll add 50 to “c,” “r,” and “e,” but by the time I need to animate “a,” I need to increase the y-position by something like 250 in order to get the same effect.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it a bug, or have I completely lost my mind?

Thanks in advance!

What makes you explode?
http://www.explosivegraffix.com

[Kevin Camp]

what i would do is set the character animator y position to 50. then twirl open the range selector for that animator, set the start to 100, the end to 0 and animate the offset.

since the default ‘based on’ setting is character (in the ‘advanced’ settings), this should make each individual character move up the screen until it hits 50.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW