Creatively Using Text Animators in After Effects

In this text animators tutorial for After Effects, Kyle Hamrick will show you how to creatively use text animators to create unique animations in Adobe After Effects. Download the Project File: http://bit.ly/2MdaLNl Explanation of the Text Animator (2:17) Creating a Tapered Stroke (15:31) Creating a Path Arrow (21:00) Creating an Abstract Dots Pattern (22:59) Creating a 3d Extruded Rotating Pattern (28:13) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇 Music (00:02): [intro music] Kyle Hamrick (00:11): Hey, what's up. This is Kyle Hamrick with school of motion. In this tutorial, we're going to be talking about a feature that you probably use all the time, but may have never really explored the aftereffects text animator. It's actually one of my favorite features. And after this, maybe it'll be yours too. You can actually use the text animator to create all kinds of cool non-text motion, designing stuff, which could otherwise take tons of layers or complicated expressions to build. You can often create things like this on a single layer with just a couple of key frames. Once you really understand how this tool works, you'll be much more efficient when you do need to animate actual text. There's a free project file included with the article on school of motion.com. But most of the examples we'll be working through are things we'll just be able to build from scratch. Kyle Hamrick (00:55): Let's check it out and see what we can do with this really powerful tool that you might have totally overlooked. I'm guessing that a lot of people have their first experience with the text animator by typing out some words, and then they dive into these presets over here. Uh, they look at a couple, they apply one and it's okay, but it's kind of lame and weird. And you know, maybe you just assume that it's kind of an outdated tool or something, right. Or maybe you get ambitious and start looking into the properties, but they just seem confusing and they're different than everything else. You just kind of give up there too, but you still needed to get your titles done. So you just broke them all up into individual words or letters and maybe just use the transform properties to bring them in. So, pretty soon you've got like 20 layers here for this basic title and you've got like 50 titles to do. Kyle Hamrick (01:44): So that's a mess too. Right? So let's stop for just a second and talk about what texts on a computer actually is. It's just a bunch of vector shapes, right? These just happened to be vector shapes that we have collectively given meaning to once you stop viewing the text animator as a way, just to bring on words and understand what it's actually doing, you'll realize it's a really awesome procedural effector based animator for vector shapes. I know what the heck is he talking about? Right. Let's dive in and I'll show you as you can see, I've changed my layout a little bit. When you twirl a text layer open all the way you end up needing quite a bit of vertical space. So this is my timeline over here, just making it so I can see a lot of height. This next portion is going to be a little bit technical. Kyle Hamrick (02:31): I'm just going to explain how all the different parts of the text animator work. I think it's important for us to understand the tool. So then we can start exploring and have some fun with it. So I'm going to start off by right clicking new text. There's a couple other ways that you can create this. I liked doing it this way because it will be centered in the composition, which is going to be good for this example. I'm just going to hit my period key several times until I've kind of filled up the width of the screen. I find this to be a very helpful way to help understand these various properties and tools are working in here because you're not focusing on this being words. You can just view it as abstract shapes for the purposes of this demonstration. I'm going to go ahead and control D duplicate this layer. For the full transcript visit: http://bit.ly/2MdaLNl