Text Mosaic Effect

[Darby Edelen]

You don’t need to create the text with Illustrator, you just need to create a full frame of text spaced evenly (use a monospace font in which all letters are the same width) against a transparent background. You can do this with Photoshop or even in After Effects.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Mike Clasby]

I think I’d do it in Photoshop, I recall an earlier post years) back where someone used Photoshop, but if you want to stick with AE, this works. It’s a Dan Ebberts expression to arrange the letters in a grid, so.. AE gets a little slow since we’re going for 5000 layers (each letter it’s own layer in ayato’s 50 rows by 100 columns). There’s probably an easier way, hope someone chimes in.

First create your comp, 2600×1950 as ayato wants, I used square pixels.

Now with the Text Tool, click on the comp and type “a”, I used Courier T1, hoping for monotype (Goggle said it was monotype) like wuzelwazel said. I went with size at 36 pixels which seems to work well.

First thing on you little “a” is to reposition the anchor point, I used the Pan Behind Tool and put the little x in the middle of the a, this keeps our grid from looking like it slipped to the right.

OK, add this expression to position, click the Position stopwatch and paste in the expression below:

horizSpace = 26;
vertSpace = 39;
numCol = 100;
origin = [horizSpace/2,vertSpace/2,0];
col = (index – 1)%numCol
row = Math.floor((index – 1)/numCol);
origin + [col*horizSpace, row*vertSpace, 0]

This expression sets up a grid with each layer 26×39 pixels (ayato’s desired size) 100 columns wide, we’ll just duplicate the layers until it fills the whole comp, 5000 layers, so if you use the same phrase ayato does, ayato@web, that’s 9 letters so we need to dup that 556 times. This will change depending on you phrase.

OK to get the phrase, duplicate the layer (ctrl D) 9 times. Then double click the letters individually and change them from “a” to what they should be, i.e. change the second a to y, the fourth a to t, etc.

You should have ayato@web positioned up in the left hand corner of you comp. Now select all the layers, copy (ctrl C) and paste, (Ctrl V), do that 556 times for this phrase and you should have your comp full of letters spaced correctly for the next step, Card Dance.

I would not use this comp directly in the next step, I would Comp>Save Frame As>File (not Photoshop layers, you don’t want 5000 Photoshop layers). Import that and go from there. I did this last step because my computer gets a little laggy with those 5000 layers.

Good luck.

[Joe Moya]

Thank you… Thank you…

I’ve been messing around off and on with this Ayoto created mosaic effect for some time and just couldn’t get it right.

Your suggestions helped a lot…. although I still have some work to go get it just right… but you help me make some giant leaps in getting this effect to work.

When I see this mosaic text effect… I can see how having an expression that could handle font size changes could come in very handy… I really wish AE would have an expression that allowed dynamic changes of the font to accomodate the various size of mosiac/tile.

Hmmm…. Any one know if AE CS3 will have a font manipulating expression? From what I could research… the answer is no.

Joe

[Dan Ebberts]

You are correct sir. The answer is unfortunately no.

Dan

[Antoni Jones]

Thank you for the information on creating the text however I’m still having problems with the effect since I can’t really follow his tutorial very well. It doesn’t seem very clear to me can somebody please create a video tutorial or something like that for this effect?.

-Regards

[Joel Osis]

hi ,
i know this was posted a while ago but heres a copy of the effect i managed to do, heres a link to the project file if you want so you can see how it was done in terms of which precomp to apply the settings to…

https://www.pianogetsmall.com/_public_html/mosaic_help/mosaic_help folder.zip

hope this helps

Joel