Color Textures & Fire Text Animation in Adobe After Effects

1. Introduction: This effect we will create right now in this class, I'll show you how you can create a goal texts transformation effect using built-in tools of Adobe After Effects. I'll share with you all my personal tips and tricks which you need to know to create seamless transformation of text font and various adjustments to get unique and fast results. Also, I'll show you how you can colorize your effect and create a cool, animated and textured background with seamless loop. The best thing about this effect is that you don't need to buy any external plugins. You don't even need to have any knowledge of Adobe After Effects. You can just download a free trial version of Adobe After Effects. And we will start from basics and gradually we'll get to more complex stuff. I think it's the best way to learn the software while greeted interesting effects for fun. And to complete this class, our goal is to create this seamless texts transformation effect. I'll be happy to see you in my class has also your result after following all the steps. So let's get started. 2. Creating Text Refrence: Okay, so I'm using Adobe After Effects 2021, but you can use pretty much any version. It will do fine. You can even download a free trial version of Adobe After Effects. And it will work rate because we are going to use simple built-in tools of Adobe After Effects. Also, I'm going to use standard layout, so you can click here. So your panels should be similar to mine. If you cannot see some of the panels which you can see on my screen, for example, paragraph. You can go to Window and enable it from here, paragraph, Paragraph. First of all, we can go to Project panel here. Click on this icon or click here to create new composition. Let's left mouse click on this icon, and let's call it text effect. Let's set 1920 by 1080, which is full HD resolution. You can uncheck this button. So you could manually write these numbers, 1920 by 1080. Also make sure that your frame rate is 30 frames per second. And our effect will take up to four seconds, maybe even three. But let's say duration to four seconds. And we will able to cut it out later if we need. So here are our frames, seconds, minutes and hours, and click Okay, so to create this effect, we need some kind of reference. First of all, we need to create a simple text. Then we are going to apply the animation using built-in tools. So let's create our tests reference. First of all, we need to go to this text tool here. Leftmost click on it, and then just create a box just by left mouse clicking and dragging like this, hold and drag. So you've created this text box and here we can just type text. We can select this text and go to paragraph and click here. It will be in the cellar and we can make it bigger by clicking here. Also, you can set all caps, so all letters will be capitalised. And at this point you can use pretty much any font. My case, I've used font which has less of these kinds of edges. In my case, it's Montserrat. It's a free font and you can download it from the web or just simply use any font you like. Also this font, I'll provide an resource step to this class, publishers link in description. So let's set Montserrat black. Maybe let's make it bigger like 350 and select the Align panel, which you can also enable it from here. Window, align with this panel. We can just click here, align horizontally and vertically, which will make it appear directly in the center of our screen. Nice thing we can do is just to spread out these letters a bit. In our case, we want just to create this kind of animation where it's transforming from this bold text to this text. Then this stretch one stretched bolt, and then back to beginning. So for our reference, we can just spread out in these letters like this. Or as much as you want to make sure this fits in the center of our screen by three here. So our next step will be right mouse click on this text layer and go to Create, create Shapes from text regulated. So as you can see, we've disabled automatically this text layer, and now we have only this shape layer. And what is cool about this shape layer that we can manipulate each point of this text. So for example, if I'm going to select this pen tool here, I can just click on this edge. You can swim with wheel on the mouse. And you can just simply select one of the points in a manipulated this, how we can just animate our points. The next video, I'm going to show you how we can animate our points using keyframes. See you in the next video. 3. Text Morph Animation: So now we have this first type of the text. The next step is to create this kind of transformation into this more lighter kind of text. As you can see, it's bolt and then kinda thin kind of text. So first of all, we need to have another reference. So let's disable this one. We can enable this text which we already have and can just duplicate. Just select it and press Control D to duplicate, disabled this one. And we will work only on this one which is on top. Now let's change to light. As you can see now we have this lighter kind of texts and we can just simply squish it together by using this tracking tool. Now we can change to any kind of value which works best on your font. So something like this, I think works great. And we can do the same which we did in previous video. We can right mouse click on this text and go to create shapes from texts. Now we create another text, outlines. At this point, it's good idea to save your project because After Effects can crash from time-to-time. So let's go to File Save. And you can pretty much save it wherever you want and click save. So now we have these both texts, but they are not transforming into each other. It's pretty easy to do if you are using the same font. Because the trick here is that your font should have the same amount of points for each letter. So for example, you can see this letter T, and it has 12345678 points. And exactly the same number of points you need to have on this other one which we just created. So let's disable this one. And you can also see that this has 12345678 points. And in this case, it will work just great because we can just open this first texts conversation texts layer and click here to scroll it down and contents, you can see each of these letters. What is cool about this that we can also open here and see also this. Each of these letters, and each of the letters have their own path. So we can simply just select it and copy. Before we want to create a keyframe, we want to save this path by clicking on this stopwatch, on this layer on top, which is main one, which is this one, Baldwin. So let's click on it. And so basically we've created our first keyframe. And what is key-frame? Key-frame is basically point in time, which remember, is the value of southern property. In our case, this keyframe. Remember this point in time, which is 0 seconds. At the beginning. It remembers the value of path, which basically this shape. And we can simply just scroll through and then change a bit. And by the way, the change in the position by clicking on one of the points also creates new keyframe. But you can click on this selection tool. Then somewhere inside. And only then you can choose pen tool and select one of the points. So basically by changing or moving these lines, you created new keyframe. This how animation works. As you can see, it tries to go from this state of this shape to this date. You can also move around, also move it a bit like this. By the way, you can use the mouse to scroll in and also hold space bar to move around. As you can see, my cursor turns to this hand tool, which allows me leftmost click and drag our window, which is really handy to move around in your image. And once again, we need to select the selection tool, click inside of this mask and then this pen tool to be able to create new shape. As you can see, it also created new keyframe. Now it's just simply jumps between these keyframes. So it goes to this first position and second position. In our case, we don't want to have these ugly shapes. So we can just select these keyframes and delete them. Just simply select them and press Delete on keyboard. And then later, like on 20th frame, we can create another keyframe. But this time we can just simply select this path from this text to outline, which is this one with thin font. We can basically select this path from letter T and press control C to copy. And then just select this path and press Control V to paste. And now as you can see, it transforms to this letter, which is pretty cool. Exactly what we want, exactly the same we want to do with this letter e. So let's copy this letter, this path. Press control C to copy. Then go to this letter e. Create a keyframe, then jumped to 20th frame. Make sure that you've selected the path of letter E. And make sure that you've copied this letter e path by selecting it and press Control C to copy. And then go to letter E here on top, and press Control V to paste. Now we already have these two letters which transforms exactly what we want. In case if your pond, it has different kinds of points. You can always just simply go to this 20th brain and manually with this pen tool, adjust the position of these points. You can also move around these dots to create another shape to match your second pond. But it's much easier to use the same font with same amount of data. As you can see, it's a lot easier and it works really great and really fast. Let's do the same with the x and t. So let's open this x and t of this text outline, which is on top, which is this one. Let's also create a keyframe for x and create a keyframe for t. Now let's go to this layer below here. Let's copy this x. Press control C to copy. Then go to 20th frame. And let's find of this texts outlines, which is both one, this letter X. Select the path and press Control V. Also, let's copy the t path Control C. Go to this t path, select it and press Control V. This how we can create this kind of animation, which is really cool. Let's also disable this one because we don't need this anymore. And now we have this kind of first kind of animation. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can stretch your texts like this. And it will still have this feel like its own fund. Because if you will, just try to press S on keyboard and stretch on scale, you can see that this doesn't look like a text font, is too stretched and doesn't really look nice, as opposed to this one which is really stretches nice. And next video, I'm going to show you how you can stretch it in right way. See you in the next video. 4. Complete Animation: So now let's stretch our texts and right way. What would be really handy in this situation is to have a ruler. So we can just press Control R. So we will be able to read a line by moving our cursor to this part of the screen. And just let me just click and drag it down. So now we can just create our outlines. So we would know how much should we want to stretch vertically. So something like this should work fine. You can also use this tidal action safe. And you would know that it's exactly the same position. So it will look nicer and we can disable here tidal action save. And now we can just simply stretch our texts. And to stretch our texts, we can open once again our contents. We can even select this layer and press U on keyboard. It only will show us our paths. In this way. It doesn't show us each letter, but we know that it is t, e, x and t. So let's give another 20 frames, which will be 1 second 10 frames. So this time we want to select our text. We can select the path, just simply select only this top points. And this way we can just simply drag it by one of the points. Left mouse click and drag up. You can hold shift on keyboard. It will allow us only drag up vertically, and as you can see it now, it's snaps to our roller. You can also go to View and make sure that you enabled your Show Rulers, Show Guides and snap to guides. In this case, it will snap to our guidelines. So let's do the same with these points below, just like them with simple selection tool. Leftmost click and drag and then hold Shift and drag it down. So it will snap also to this guideline. Now as you can see, it looks a lot better than just using scale. So let's see how it looks. It looks pretty good to me. And our next step is to create this kind of really bold text on entire screen and then back to normal. So let's do exactly this. By the way, you can just simply go to back to this text from here. You could just simply select these keyframes and press Control C and Control V. And it will just undo this kind of motion. But in my case, I want these letters to be all over the screen so we can still copy these first keyframes, which is for this text bold, and then just go to this two seconds and paste. Now what we can do is to select this path one and then press Shift on keyboard, and then press the right arrow on keyboard, which will move to the right like this. You can do the same with this path to and with this third path, we can just squish it together like this. So this test would look at IRR. So just by using the arrow keys and selecting these paths, you want to make sure that your text is in the center of our screen. So let's move it a bit to the left like this, and this looks pretty good. The next step, which we can do is to select all of these paths and double-click on one of the points. Just select the selection tool and left mouse double-click on one of the points. It will allow us to scale our text. So we can just click on this corner and drag it to the right. If you hold Control, it will scale up from the center. And if you hold Shift Also, it will scale up uniformly. We can also drag it to the left to make sure that it's still in center of our screen and we can still move one letter at a time. Let's make sure that it's still transforms. Okay, great. Finally, we can just select one of the points and then select these top ones. More up like this by holding shift as we did before. And also with these points here, you can also hold Shift to add some of the points for removes some of the points to your selection. And then let's move down like this. And let's just create a nice letter x. And at this point you can be creative and adjust your font as you like. So for example, if you want to have this letter e more stretched, now we can just select this letter and stretch it a bit so it would look nicer. The same thing you can do with this letter T and adjust as you like. But for this class, I don't want to waste any time. And it looks fine to me like this, as you can see now we have this kind of animation. And finally, we can skip another 20 frames and select these keyframes, which is here at the beginning, and press Control C and Control V to paste. And if we will cut this work area to this moment and press 0 numbered, we can see that we already have this kind of animation. Now let's also save our project. Press Control S or go to File Save. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can create this animation so it, each of the letters will go one after another. See you next video. 5. Complex Animation: First of all, what we can do is to select these key-frames. Can press F9. So if I'm going to press 0 map, but you can see that the motion starts a bit slower than fester and then slower. To each of these moments. What we can also do is to go to graph editor. Here, select all these keyframes. Just left mouse click and drag it to select all of them is important to click here. Choose graph type and options and set to Edit Speed Graph. This case, you'll see the same graph as I'm seeing on my screen. So now when we've selected our points like this, we can simply just leftmost slick on this handle hold and drag it to the left. A bit like this, maybe like 90 per cent. Now let's press 0 number to see what we've got. Now as you can see, this motion starts faster and slower at the end, which looks a lot more interesting, and drag it to the right if you want this animation to look a bit different and smaller. So it's up to you to play around with these handles to get the different kind of look. Next thing which we want to do is to go out from Graph Editor. We want to exit graph editor and cascade these keyframes. Basically we can just select all of these keyframes, decide on the top ones. And then click here two times on this next frame, button 12. And then just move these keyframes to second frame, which basically means that the first letter T will start sooner. And then other ones. Same thing, we want to do it with each letter. So let's press one to select these letters and move it later. And then this letter t, which is less one. We can also press 12 and move it like this. So now what we have, we can also manipulate this work area so it will take up all of our animation. Now let's press 0 number to see what we have. We have a little cascade. So this animation happens on the letters one by one. So it would look even more interesting at this point. We don't want to see all of these layers and we will work only with this one. So let's select these layers. You can just select the top one, hold Shift and select this bottom one. Then go to toggle switches and click here to hide these letters. And also we're here to hide them as well. So in the next video, I'm going to show you how you can add this kind of stylization to our text has also the background. You see in the next video. 6. Textured Background: So the easiest thing to do is to add background. So let's start with the background. Now we don't want these rollers anymore, so we can just click on them and drag it to the top and this one to the bottom, so it will disappear. You can also press Control R. So we would not see our rulers. And also we can disable this title action safe. So now we have only this onscreen. Now let's create our background. To create our background, we can go to layer new solid. Let's call it BG for background. Then click Okay. So now we want to apply an effect called Gradient Ramp. So go to effects and presets. If you cannot see this panel here, you can go to Window and enable it from here, Effects and Presets. It will load up and then just type gradient to see this gradient ramp. So let's let mouse click and drag on this layer here. And now we can manipulate with this effect. First of all, what we can do is to swap the colors and then change this linear ramp to radial ramp because we want to have this kind of center, which would be lighter. And then we want some kind of vignette on the edges. If you want to have the same kind of gradient as I have here, just copy these values you can see on my screen. So you'll get the exactly the same gradient also by wanted to change this color to a darker one. So once again, if you want to have the gray color, which perhaps here, you can just type here twenty eight, twenty eight, twenty eight. And click Okay. Also, if I'm going to zoom in, you can see these kind of circles which we can reduce by holding Alt on keyboard and go into this project panel and then just let mostly here. So go to at least 16 bits per channel, which will reduce a bit these circles. But also we can go to effects, controls and change this ramp scatter. Let's set to 500. And as you can see, we removed most of them. Also, we can create this gradient even tighter. We can use curves effect for this and drag it here. Let's add a bit of contrast just by clicking and dragging this curve here. Let's drag it to the right. So that's how you can manipulate this kind of gradient. Also, we can duplicate this background, select it, and press Control D to duplicate and delete all of these effects. So select all of them and press Delete. At this point, I want to add a bit more lecture. So let's type here fractal noise because this effect we will use and drag it on this BG on top. Here we can change the practical type. And Mike is dynamic, works best. But you play around with these fractal types. If you want to have kind of different kind of loop, then I've used black. You can also change to any other to see what you prefer. But in my case, I wanted to have real small spectacles are my background. So let's increase our contrast to about two hundred, five hundred degrees, the brightness to minus 105. So now as you can see, we have this kind of texture. And I also want to go to transform and change the scale to real small lake three. And if I'm going to zoom in, you can see that we have this really nice dots on our screen. You can change to a bit bigger to see it better. I'm going to set to seven, so it will be easier after compression of this class video, it should be more visible than if I'm going to use three. I'm going to use seven, but you play around with the smaller value. And finally, I want to animate this kind of background so it will not be just static. You can go to evolution options and change this random seed. We can hold alt key on keyboard and left mouse click on this stopwatch next to the random seed that most ligand it. And let's type time, multiply seven, and click anywhere here. So in this case, it will change to random seed, which basically means two random pattern. This kind of spectacles, each seven frames. So as you can see, each seven frames, it changes. And if I'm going to press 0 numbered, it looks more interesting. Okay, so we've created our cool texture of the background. We can also click on Toggle Switches and change this layer on top of the screen. So it will be on top of our gradient. Once again, I recommend you to use smaller value, so it will be less noticeable. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can apply this kind of pattern of fire to our effect. See you next video. 7. Finalizing with Textures and Effects: So now we have this really nice background, and now let's create some fairly animation. First thing I want to do is to change this color. I want to have it as a yellow. Light yellow pretty much will be same as white. But I want to have this kind of hint of the yellow. And let's click Okay. So here infile, we can change the color of the text. So next effect, which we are going to apply is wrapped and edges. Basically this effect drives this kind of fire a little look, you need to change this edge type to spikier edge sharpness we can increase. So it would be not that Laurie at the edges like now. We can set it to war. You can see now it's not that blurry. And also we want to animate our evolution. Hold Alt key on keyboard is you can see I'm holding Alt, leftmost click on this evolution. And let's type time. Multiply 250, which basically will add more animation to our edges. As you can see, now these edges kind of live a bit. They are changing even if our texts doesn't change. Which looks more interesting. Next thing which I want to do is to set this play head to the beginning and we want to animate this border. So it will get really crazy like this at some points and then back to normal. So at the beginning, I want to set it to 0. So it will be just nice and clean text. Now let's create a keyframe. Then later in the video about these key frames like this, we want to create another keyframe. So as you can see, we have already this border keyframe. You can press U on keyboard and U one more time to see all the keyframes. And about here, we can increase the amount of border. Basically, our idea is when these texts, letters animate, it will distort a bit about here. Let's set it to value like 36. And as you can see, we've added this animation about here. We want to set this value to the normal as well. So let's set it to 0. So now we have this kind of cool animation. Same thing we want to do here when it's changing. So we can also select this first keyframe and this last keyframe and press F9, which basically means that this distortion will start slow than fester, and then slow again, which corresponds to our animation. And it looks more natural. Then let's keep a few frames late to this kind of timeframe. Let's copy this keyframe, press Control C and Control V to paste. And once again, about here at the end of the animation, we can copy this key frame control C, control V, so it will get back to normal. And let's keep your frames here. Copy this keyframe Control C, Control V. And go here, and let's copy this keyframe here. As you can see, this text is really big, so it's a good idea to skip your frames and set it to 15, an alkene. We don't want to distort this layer on top, which will be this kind of white layer because we still need to see our text. So what we can do is just simply a slate, this keyframe control C, control V here. And basically it means that it will stay the same like this. And by the end, we can also set it to 0. So let's press 0 number to see what we got. Now as you can see, we have this nice animation, but it's still pretty clean because we need to see our texts. It's all times. What we can do is to close it here and duplicate this text layer. Let's rename it. You can just press Enter on keyboard and let's call it text yellow. And maybe let's add some glow. So let's type here Effects and Presets, low, scrolling down and under Stylize, lets slow and drop it here. Now as you can see, it's turned white, but we still have this hint of yellow, which works perfect for us, but we can just add a bit of glow radius. Let's set it to 32, so it would be much easier to see. Now let's lower the intensity like 2.6. Sonatas can see we have this really hot glow inside. And then these edges, which is kinda goes to yellow color, which is exactly what we want. It will blend with other colors even better. Okay, Now we can just duplicate this text, the yellow and press Control D. And let's rename it text white. So this text white, we will leave as it is, because it's still white and this yellow. Let's change the color. This time. I want to have this yellow really, really noticeable. Also, I want to delete this low because we don't want it anymore. And to see this yellow layer better, we can just simply skip two frames forward. So let's click 12 and move it forward like this. And now as you can see, we have this kind of yellow color. But if you zoom in, you can see that it still has some kind of shadow. And to avoid this kind of hero, we can change this mode of this text white. The screen. Now we have this kind of nice blend which we want to have. You can play around with the color of this yellow. It's up to you which kind of color you want to have. But what we really want to do is to press U on keyboard and to see our border. And now I want to change this transformation here. Because here we can add some kind of stylized look to this effect. We can create another keyframe for scale of our roughen edges effect. So let's click on this scale and press U on the keyboard and U one more time. So we will see this keyframe as well. And then skip to this keyframe which is here. If you hold Shift, it will snap to this key-frame. And let's change the scale to really big value like 250. And as you can see, we have this kind of different kind of look to our edge, which gives more complexity to our effect. And it looks even more interesting. Here at this keyframe, we can set back to 100. Here. We can just copy this 100 again, Control C, Control V, N about here. We can also change it to 250. So it wouldn't be a more noticeable. We can change the border as well. So let's increases to 50. And as you can see, we have this nice wisps of our border. Let's also go to this keyframe here. And let's set it to 50. You can play around with these values as you like. And here at the end, we can set back to 50. So this is basically how you can add this really cool effect with the yellow color. The red color will be much easier to add. As you can guess, we can just simply close this layer and press Control D to duplicate. Move it down. And let's call it red one, just pressing Enter on keyboard and type red, and simply just change to kind of orangeish red color. We can also skip two frames, 12 by clicking here. So this is basically how you can add these kinds of colors. And it looks pretty cool. You can also press U on keyboard and change these key frames in between two different kind of values, like 150. So it will still get more kinds of different edges if you want to add even more complexity. So here we can also change the scale to 150 and you'll add even more complexity to your effect. It looks pretty cool, but we have really big problem here. I'm going to click here to deselect all of the layers. You can see that we still cutting our layers like this and we are not getting this effect on the edges. If you like, as it looks, you can leave it as is. But I want to also show you how you can avoid this problem. If you don't like it. You can just simply type here Motion Tile and simply just drag here before wrapping edges effect. And you can see it adds this kind of page back in. Same thing we want to do with this yellow one. So you can see it's cut off. Let's drag it in before and it's appears the edges. And also on this white one, just drag it before wrapping edges. Let's press 0 number to see what we got. We have already pretty cool effect. But I've also thought that it would be nicer to add a little something. So this effect would look even more complex. This little thing will be even easier to do. You just basically select this text white, press Control D to duplicate, and let's call it outline. Now we can just simply select all of these effects and press Delete to delete them. And we can just simply click on this fill. By clicking here on none. We can disable it and click Okay. And also we want to add some stroke. We can add yellow stroke, something like this. And click Okay. And to see the stroke on this outline texts, we want to skip from this last layer or frames 1234, and then just drag it to the right. And if I'm going to click here, you can see that we've added this and other texts with the stroke. Let's select it and maybe change the stroke to five. So it will be a lot easier to see. But you can also play around with these values to get the look which you like. And if I'm going to let mostly on this page and drag it to the beginning as well as here. And here. It will still be onscreen because it's cut up. It will appear randomly, which is not what you want. Let's expand it and let's see what it looks like. N final thing, which you can add is a bit like a shadow. I can just select this text outline and press Control D to duplicate and place it here below. And let's call it shadow. Just press Enter and call it shadow. And to add this shadow so it would be visible. We can set it even later, like to 13 frames. So let's set this to 13 frame. As you can see, it starts a bit about here. So we need to move it to five frames to the right and expanded. As you can see, this layer starts here. Finally, you just simply click on the Stroke. Click on man, and click on this field and set it to black and click. Okay? And in this case, we've paid in our shadow. But before we will need to change this shadow to normal. Now, we can see that we've added our shadow. If you cannot see your shadow pretty well, you just simply can go to this VG and make your background a bit brighter to see your shadow as you can see here. Better. My case, I'm going to leave as it is. And let's press 0 numbered. And let's see what we've got. And finally, what we can do is to add some little adjustment layer. Let's click here. Adjustment layer. Drag it on top. Once again, you need to go to layer, new adjustment layer to add this adjustment layer. And we can add some effects like Optics Compensation, like most leak and drop it on adjustment layer. And let's change this value. So this optics compensation effect, you can get this kind of strange look or you can go other way around. You can just disable it and apply some bulge effect and drop it here. Makes sure to increase your effect. So it will be a lot bigger like this and here and a bulge height, you can decrease this amount. So it will bulge out exactly as you want. You can also add chromatic aberration effect. You just type here we are this chromatic aberrations. And as you can see, we can just simply set these values to a bit smaller value, like minus 55 to add these kind of different variation in color if you want. Once again, we can press 0 number to see how it looks. More, variation in color, which looks pretty nice. And you can just switch back to any other kind of effect which you want to apply and see what works best for your work. As you can guess, you can go with other kinds of colors. For example, you can set this to 0 and this to five, and you'll get variation in color, or this two minus five. And you'll get different kinds of colors and play around to get the exact look we should like. Feel free to follow me here on Skillshare. I have a lot of places fun VFX using Adobe After Effects, because I think it's pretty fun to create something interesting and meanwhile, learn the software. Also I have another texts animation effect has also called Freeze affects texts animation. Other kinds of animation complexity effects, even logo animation and even Da Vinci Resolve animation. I also recommend you to check this color texture texts animation in Adobe After Effects because it's much cleaner, but also pretty fun. Or just check this really fast 12 minutes class on VFX. And you'll see that you are able to create a really fun VFS inside of Adobe After Effects. So feel free to follow me here on Skillshare classes every week. Thank you for watching.