[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Some general guidelines.

1) Create the object at its largest and smallest size at the far ends of the gradient and use blend for the in-between objects

2) Duplicate the blended object set by alt-dragging (option-dragging on mac) and ctrl-D (cmd-D) for duplicate transformation for additional copies. Hold shift to keep them aligned to 0/45/90 degrees.

3) Expand the blends to access individual objects to delete them etc.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

There’s an offset path effect that will do this correctly. Start by drawing the middle path, expand it and use the offset path effect to create the other lines, with positive or negative offset values. Expand the results so that you can edit the paths separately.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If you can pick whip the result value of N, you should be able to do it in this fashion for opacity:

n0 = pick_whip_n_source_here;
n1 = pick_whip_n_source_here.valueAtTime(time-thisComp.frameDuration);
if(n0 != n1) 100 else 0

If you can’t pick whip the values directly, you’ll have to calculate them for those two time values (current with no additional code and previous frame with the valueAtTime as per above).

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Without looking at Freeform interface, I believe the issue is simply getting the individual coordinates out of the null’s position. The 3D position being an array with 3 individual value, you can get them connected correctly like this:

X position = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”)[0]
Y position = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”)[1]
Z position = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”)[2]

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Most “particles forming into text” in AE are done with Particular or Form, rendered from text to scattered particles and then time reversed so that particles form into text. Particular probably slightly better in this case with its Air Physics options.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I doubt everything there has such a specific name.
The generic categories these fall under are kinetic type, animated text and animated fonts.
Most of the animations also use overshoot and bounce.
The variations on those themes are literally endless.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Not that I know. There’s a simple workaround though: first copy-paste the text into notepad then copy-paste the notepad text to the target layer.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Particular will not give you those connecting lines, so it is pretty much out of question.

With Plexus you can always use a second (third, fourth…) layer with specific points on them if you want added flexibility. You can control every single point with a null object, if need be, so if you want lines between specific points, you can put just those points on a separate Plexus layer or precomp with just those nulls.

Alternatively, there’s a connect layers plugin, but I would still suggest Plexus for anything even slightly complex.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

What you want is a vector layer instead of a bitmap layer. Then you can turn on continuous rasterize (the “sun” icon) on the precomp and the vectors will be sharp at any scale and camera distance. The workability of this depends to a degree on whether this will affect the camera view or not, since the same button controls Collapse transformations state, i.e. it will use the main comp camera for your precomp as well.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Hi Allan,

Ok, yes, that’s more complicated.

It’s not going to be very straightforward, but it could be done. You’ll need sliders for each card separately. The slider would be a “remove card” slider going (for sake of simplicity in percentage calculations) from 0 to 100. The 0 state would be card in stack, the 100 state would be card out of stack. At the same time, the same slider would be a tween animation slider between two states, the stack with that card in it and the stack without that card. So you would need to calculate both results, then use the slider value to interpolate between them. The “which cards are in the stack” text layer would have to read the values of the individual sliders to see which cards sliders are at 0 or 100 or in-between.

Tricky, but possible.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer