TEXT ANIMATION – RANDOM POSITION ORDER REVEAL

[Kevin Camp]

If you are using a character animator, you can prevent the interpolation between positions by setting the ‘smoothness’ to 0 (Animator > Range Selector > Advanced > Smoothness). That work make each letter ‘pop’ from the position to the origin if the Offset animated from 0 to 100. And if Randomize Order is ‘on’ (in the same Advanced property group) then they would pop in place in a random order.

The hard part is to get random positions for each character individually. I was able to get something that might work for you. Do the setup outlined above: add a character animator for position, set the position to something like 500, 500 (you can change it later), animate the offset to go from 0 to 100, set the smoothness to 0 and the randomize order to ‘on’.

If you scrub thru the animation the word should be positioned off the origin and each letter should pop in place randomly.

To get random positions for each letter click the menu arrow next to ‘add’ to the right of the Animator in the timeline and choose Selector > Expressions, and then try this expression:

seedRandom( textIndex + text.animator("Animator 1").selector("Range Selector 1").advanced.randomSeed, true ) ; 
x = selectorValue[0] * random( -1, 1 ) ;
y = selectorValue[1] * random( -1, 1 ) ;
z = selectorValue[2] * random( -1, 1 ) ;
[ x, y, z ]

That should randomize the positions of the characters. You can now fiddle with the Animator’s Position property and also the Random Seed in the Advanced settings to effect the random positions of the letters

[Kevin Camp]

Actually you could do this without any expressions. I was able to get similar results using a Wiggly Selector rather than an Expression Selector…

If interested, do the steps above but instead of adding the Expression Selector and the expression, choose Selector > Wiggly from the Add menu. Then set the Wiggles/Second property to 0.

The result is pretty similar to the random expression above.

To further affect the scattered position of the characters you have several settings to choose from, not just Random Seed and the Character Animator Position property…. you can use jsut about all the Wiggly Selector’s properties to affect the scattered positions, with Spacial Phase seeming to affect the random positions the most.