Text Animation In Adobe After Effects From Beginner To Advanced | Valeri Visuals | Skillshare
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Text Animation In Adobe After Effects From Beginner To Advanced

teacher avatar Valeri Visuals, Adobe After Effects Instructor

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      2:16

    • 2.

      Section 1: Warm up Lesson

      1:45

    • 3.

      Introduction to After Effects

      12:52

    • 4.

      Design the first scene

      7:25

    • 5.

      Let's Animate the First Scene

      16:49

    • 6.

      Animtating the Second Scene and Rendering the Project

      15:03

    • 7.

      Section 2: Wavy text Animation

      0:49

    • 8.

      Getting better with text animators

      11:00

    • 9.

      Learn how to loop the scene

      9:23

    • 10.

      Work smarter

      9:10

    • 11.

      Learn how to deal with changes

      10:40

    • 12.

      Section 3: Vertical text animation

      0:53

    • 13.

      Learn advanced text animators techniques

      9:52

    • 14.

      Convert a vertical text animation to a horizontal

      5:15

    • 15.

      Let's render the final animation and orginize the project

      5:24

    • 16.

      Section 4: Paragraph Animation

      1:18

    • 17.

      Learn how to work with text paragraph

      4:48

    • 18.

      Advanced text paragraph animation

      10:43

    • 19.

      Nifty workflow tips

      8:56

    • 20.

      Make it readable

      9:03

    • 21.

      Section 5: Advanced Kynetic Typography Animation

      0:58

    • 22.

      Let's design the scene

      4:24

    • 23.

      Installing a handy free script

      13:34

    • 24.

      Improve the animation and render the final version

      9:27

    • 25.

      Section 6: Isometric Camera Text Animation

      1:04

    • 26.

      Setting up the scene

      5:44

    • 27.

      Work in 3D space

      14:51

    • 28.

      Create an isometric camera and animate the scene with one layer

      15:11

    • 29.

      Section 7: Text on 3D Objects

      0:38

    • 30.

      Learn to combine text layers with 3D objects

      12:14

    • 31.

      Let's animate the scene

      9:41

    • 32.

      Learn to replace precomps like a pro

      3:43

    • 33.

      Section 8: 3D Text Animation

      1:00

    • 34.

      Text on paths

      14:05

    • 35.

      Animating 3D text on path

      6:26

    • 36.

      How to deal with changes

      8:37

    • 37.

      Section 9: Stretched Text Animation

      1:17

    • 38.

      Basics of stretched text animation

      19:18

    • 39.

      Advamced streched text animation

      15:17

    • 40.

      Improving the look and the animation

      7:37

    • 41.

      Use simple effects and advanced functions to improve the animation

      16:32

    • 42.

      Text in Motion project task

      0:31

    • 43.

      Outro

      0:52

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About This Class

Master text animation in Adobe After Effects and learn how to create super cool Kinetic Typography scenes.

First of all, please download the main folder for the course, named "D.I.M_Text Animation Course".
Clck here to download the main folder for the course

In this amazing course, you’ll dive deep into the art of animating text layers and typography in After Effects. It's a unique nine-lesson adventure that'll make learning After Effects super fun! By the end of this course, you'll have nine jaw-dropping text animations ready to elevate your next project or impress your portfolio website visitors!

Section 1: Warm up Lesson

Section 2: Wavy text Animation

Section 3: Vertical text animation

Section 4: Paragraph Animation

Section 5: Advanced Kynetic Typography Animation

Section 6: Isometric Camera Text Animation

Section 7: Text on 3D Objects

Section 8: 3D Text Animation

Section 9: Stretched Text Animation

With each lesson, we'll be cranking up the difficulty level, boosting your confidence and skills along the way. Plus, you'll learn how to handle changes and tweak text to fit whatever you or your client needs.

In this course, you will not only master text animation techniques, but you'll also get a solid understanding of After Effects fundamentals. We'll even install some handy free tools that will speed up your workflow efficiency. It’s a great course, especially for absolute beginners that want to take the first step into the Motion Design world. So if you’re a Graphic designer, Photographer, Videographer, or illustrator, this one is for you.

To give you the best learning experience during the lessons:

  • You’ll get clear ques on when to work along with me and when to just listen without touching the computer.
  • You’ll also get mid-lesson questions to help you memorize the lessons better.
  • In addition, you will get instructions on performing shortcuts and different functions for both PC and Mac users.
  • And I’ll even tell you when to take breaks.
  • And, of course, I will provide super fun assignments at the end of each lesson, just like in a real classroom.

On top of all, I created a free class, especially for beginners – in which you’ll learn all the important fundamentals and gain an understanding of what it’s like to work in Adobe After Effects. So, if during this class, you come across a topic that interests you and you want to learn more about it, you are more than welcome to learn it in the free lesson. You can find the link in the description of the first lesson of this class.

Free Class to Learn the software (After Effects) even better

Oh, and don't worry, you won't have to hear my funky accent throughout the lessons. This class is voiced by a professional voiceover. Okay, enough with the talking. Let's get started!

Meet Your Teacher

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Valeri Visuals

Adobe After Effects Instructor

Top Teacher

Hi, I'm Valeri! I am a freelance Motion Graphics Designer who also teaches After Effects, the best software for Motion Graphics. My job here is to teach you the best skills in Adobe After Effects so that you can start a successful career in Motion Design.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always been into drawing. I started off doodling animals, cartoon characters, and people. As I grew older, I decided to take my passion more seriously and got a bachelor's degree in visual communication, which covered graphic design, illustration, and animation. And would you believe it? I even worked at an animation studio for a whole year during my third year of college! I worked at an animation studio for a year but eventually decided to go freelance full-time. I loved what I did so much that I st... See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Intro: Hey, what's up? I'm Valerie. I've been a professional motion designer since 2018. And in 2020, I started to teach the best software for motion graphics, Adobe After Effects. Along the way, I shared countless tutorials on social media. And in 2023, I released the Ultimate Beginners Guide to After Effects. Absolutely for free, for you to learn after effects from scratch. Following that, I created the second course, After Effects Micro animation. So you can learn to create super cool animations using basic shape layers. Only now, I'm thrilled to introduce you my new creation, text in Motion. In this course, you'll dive deep into the art of animating text layers and typography in after effects. By the end of this course, you will have nine jaw dropping text animations ready to elevate your next project or impress your portfolio website visitors. With each lesson, we'll be cracking up the difficulty level, boosting your confidence and skills along the way. Plus you'll learn how to handle changes and tweak text to fit whatever you or your client needs. In this course, you will not only master text animation, but you'll also get a solid understanding after effects fundamentals. We'll even install some handy free tools that will speed up your workflow efficiency. Just like my other courses, I'm all about ensuring you have the best learning experience. Therefore, you will get a clear notification on when to work along with me and when to just listen without touching the computer. You'll also get a mid lessons questions to help you memorize the lessons better. And I'll even tell you when to take a 10 minutes break, just like in a real classroom. Oh, and don't worry, you won't have to hear my funky accent throughout the lessons. This course is voiced by professional voiceover. So get ready to be inspired, get motivated, and put some text in motion. 2. Section 1: Warm up Lesson: Hi and welcome to the first lesson on text animation. In this lesson, we're going to explore the exciting world of text animation and after effects together and create some awesome animations. Our focus will be on creating two different scenes with the first two titles in the first scene and the 23 titles in the second scene. By creating these scenes, we'll be mastering the three main methods of animating text and after effects. Over the next few lessons, we'll be delving deeper into each technique and creating more advanced animations. This lesson is divided into four parts. In the first part, I will show you how to install after effects. Then we'll create the main folder for the course and learn how to work in an organized manner for motion design projects. Afterward, we will install the necessary fonts. Once completed, we will enter after effects to create our first composition and configure the software settings for a better workflow. Moving on to the second part, we'll delve into the fundamental parameters of a layer in after effects before designing the first scene. In the third part, we will focus on animating the first scene while learning the first two methods. Then we'll learn how to improve the animation we created. In the fourth and final part, we will create the second scene and convert a regular layer into a three D layer. Then we will learn how to connect the two scenes. Next, we'll learn how to render the animation as a high quality MP four file that you can share on social media or your portfolio website. Finally, I show you how to organize the project before closing it. It's going to be awesome. Let's get started. 3. Introduction to After Effects: Hey there. Before we dive into animating text layers and after effects, don't forget to download the main folder of the course with all the necessary materials. That way you can follow along with me through the lessons. Next, let's talk about getting Adobe After Effects set up. It's a program made by Adobe, the company that creates some of the coolest platforms for creators out there. If you don't have an Adobe subscription yet, no worries. Check out the PDF file and the main folder for a link to a free trial. Sign up for the trial and head over to the app section to install after effects. If you already have an Adobe subscription, simply log into your account on the website or the desktop version, head over to the app section and install after effects from there. While installing the software, make sure to include the cinema for plug in because we are going to use it in the course. Once it's installed, we're ready to get started to make sure we do not run into any problems down the line. It's a good idea to keep things organized when we're working on an after effects project. One way to do this is by creating some folders on our computer. Let's find a spot where we can make the main folder for the course. Let's create a new folder. Great. And now let's call it D M underscore text animation inside that folder, we need to make three more folders. The first one is for our after effects files, so we'll call it, the second one is for all the graphics we're going to use, and we'll call that one assets. The last one is for any test videos or renders we make as we work on the project, which we'll call renders or samples. Now let's open the folder you downloaded from me and navigate to the Assets folder located here. Copy all the assets in this folder to the Assets folder you just created. Next, let's install the fonts we will be using. In this course, I will show you how to install fonts for Windows and Mac users. Let's start with this font. Enter the OTF folder for Windows users. Select all the files, right click and choose install for all users or install. This font is already installed on my computer, so that I won't install it again for Mac users. Open a new folder and with finder selected, click on. Now click on Go to Folder and type this line. Then press Enter. This will bring you to the fonts folder installed on your system. Now copy the OTF files from the course folder and paste them into the fonts folder. Excellent. Now let's install the second font. Go to the fonts folder, enter the OTF folder, select all the files, right click and choose install for all users or install. Great, let's go back to the assets folder and install the last font. Excellent, let's move on. After installing the fonts, it's time to launch after effects together. Great, now we can close this window to make sure we all see the same panel arrangement. Let's click on Default. Now, like in any editing software, we need to open a new file to do that. And after effects, we need to create our first composition. Let's click on New Composition. Now we'll define the settings for our first composition. Let's name it Text Animation One. Here we'll define the format size, which means the size of our first composition. This is the dimensions of the width and height of the composition we create, which will be the size of the final video at the end, different cases require different resolutions. As shown in the examples. A regular Instagram feed required posts to be 1080 pixels in width by 1080 pixels in height. The new feed requires a height of 1,350 pixels. For stories, reels, and Tiktok videos, the size should be 1080 pixels in width and 1920 pixels in height. For Youtube videos, it's best to use a resolution of 1080 pixels in height and 1920 pixels in width, which is a full HD format. If you want to make a four K video, you'll need to use full HD resolution multiplied by two. This time will work with a format size of 1080 pixels in width and 13, 50 pixels in height. This is a perfect size for sharing posts on social media. All right, moving on here, we'll choose the frame rate for our animation. What is the frame rate in the world of video and animation? Frame rate refers to the number of individual frames or pictures shown per second to create the illusion of motion. Frame rate is measured in frames per second, FPS. The higher the frame rate, the smoother the motion appears. Most common videos and films use a frame rate of 24, 25, 30 frames per second. But if you want to create an animation for an app or a website, it's better to work on 60 frames per second. When you work with video editing software like after effects, you have the flexibility to choose the frame rate for your project. It's important to note that the frame rate can affect the file size of the final file. Also, higher frame rates require more storage space and computing power, which can slow down your workflow. In our case, let's set it to 30 frames per second. Next, let's set the duration of our first composition. Let's set it to 10 seconds. Finally, let's select the background color for the composition. Keep in mind that we can easily change all these settings at any stage of the animation later on. And there you have it. You created your first composition. Before we dive in, I want to mention a few important things while working with after effects. First, if you see the preview screen like this, don't worry, it's probably because your caps lock key is on. Just turn it off and everything should be back to normal. Next, when you're working on a project in after effects, make sure you switch your computer's language to English. This way, all the shortcuts we use will work properly. And if you don't see the background color, then simply click here. Now if you see the numbers here differently from mine, make sure to zoom out the timeline panel. Now you can hover your mouse here, hold down the control or a command key, and click on the numbers here. These numbers represent the duration of our composition timeline. We can see it in frames or in seconds. Then if you see the preview screen smaller or larger than mine, simply click here and select Fit. Finally, click here and change the preview quality here to Full Al. Right. Now for a better workflow, let's adjust the software preferences. Go to Edit Preferences, Mac users, you can access preferences this way. Now go to General and set the software preferences exactly like I did. You can pause the video and continue it when you are ready to move on. In the meantime, I'll continue to the next one. Now let's use this opportunity to talk about the auto saving feature. This feature saves your work automatically. At certain intervals, you don't lose any progress. If the program crashes or something crazy happens, I usually have it set to save every 5 minutes, but you can choose whatever time frame works for you. All right, moving on now, head over to the script and expression section and check all the boxes. As I did once, you're good to go, Hit okay and we can start the lesson. Note that you don't need to mess with these settings every time you start a new project. You said at once and you're good to go. Okay, after we have created the first composition and adjusted the software preferences, we need to save the project and give it a name. To do this, let's go to File and click on Save. Now let's find the folder we created for the lesson. Enter the AE folder and give the after effects file. We are currently working on a name. It can be the same name as our first composition or any other name you prefer. Basically, we are giving a name to the after effects project we are working on. As you can see, the after effects file doesn't have a name at the moment. The name we gave earlier. It was the name of the composition. The composition we are currently in. Now, we are giving a name to the after effects file. All right, so let's click on Save. And now our project has a name. You can locate the after effects file we saved in the AE folder. When we initially saved the project, we gave it a name and most importantly activated the autosave function. Now we are ready to get started. The first thing we will do is import the color palette into the project. To import assets into the project, you can either manually drag them from the computer like that, or you can double click on the gray area in the project panel. Now let's locate the folder we created for the lesson and enter the Assets folder. Select the color palette and click on Import. Now the color palette is in the project, but we don't see it in the preview screen of the composition we created. To see the color palette and the composition, we need to bring it into the layers panel located here. To do this, we can simply drag the color palette into the composition like this. Now we see the color palette in the preview screen. Now we can resize this layer manually by grabbing its edge here while holding down the shift key. We can resize the layer symmetrically. Now release the click on the mouse and then release the shift key. Furthermore, we can scale down the layer from the layers panel using the basic layer transform properties. Click on the small arrow of the layer to see it. If we open these properties, we can see the basic parameters for every layer and after effects. Here we have the position parameter, which allows us to move the layer left and right, up or down. Here we see the scale parameter. We can change the value of this parameter manually, or we can click on the value and enter a specific number. Let's write 30 and press Enter. There is also a parameter called rotation which allows us to rotate the layer. I will set it back to zero. Finally, there is also the opacity parameter which controls the transparency of the layer. Okay, now after we finish reducing the layer size, we can close the properties and move the layer here. Let's lock this layer from here to ensure that we can't move it. Additionally, we can hide this layer in the layers panel by using the shy function located here. If you don't see the icon, you can click here. Okay, let's mark this layer as an invisible layer. To activate the function, we need to click here on the shy icon as well. Now we can see it on our previous screen, but it doesn't bother us in the layers panel. With this, we finished the first part and we are ready to move on to the next one. See you there. 4. Design the first scene: Welcome back. Now we need to create the first title to do it, we need to create a text line. Let's select the text tool. I want you not to do it together with me for now because I want to explain a few things before we start. Don't worry, we'll do it together in a few moments. Once we choose the text tool, there are two ways to create a text box and a text line. If I select a specific area like this, I will create a text box. And if I write something here, the text will automatically drop to the next line when it reaches the boxes boundaries. Now I can adjust the size of the box as desired. The second way is to create a text line for that. I'll click here on the previous screen and type in some text. This is how we create a text line. Unlike a text box, a text line doesn't have borders that we can adjust. Okay, so I'll delete the two layers I created. Go back to the selection tool and let's do it together. Now let's select the text tool. Now click here, wants to create a text line, and let's write the word text. To start writing an upper case, you can hold down the shift key and type the letter. Now let's write the rest of the word without holding the shift key. Next, let's select all the text by double clicking on it. Now let's adjust it using the Character tab. If you don't see it, you can find it under window. Okay, First let's choose the font style. I'll right L here, scroll down a bit, and select Bold in Style. Since I know I'll use this font a lot in this course, I can save it as a favorite for this, let's click on the star icon here. Now I can click here to see all my favorite fonts. This way I don't need to search for it every time. And to go back to see all the fonts, click here once again. All right, now let's change the font size. We can do it by dragging this value to the sides or by entering a specific number. Let's set it to 300. If you want to change the font style, you can open all the different options here or click here once and use the up and down arrows. Set it to display heavy. Now let's center the layer in the composition using the Align tool. Click here. Here. One last thing. Let's go to Paragraph and make sure the text is aligned to the center and the writing direction is left to right. If your layer moves to the side after doing this, simply re center the layer using a line. Now I want to talk to you about a very important topic called Anchor Point. I'm talking about this red icon. Let's see what it does and why it's so important. I'll open the rotation parameter and rotate this layer. Pay attention to how it rotates. It rotates in relation to the position of the anchor point. If I want the text layer to rotate from its center, I need to place the anchor point in the center of the layer. I can do this using the anchor point tool located here. Let's select it together and move the anchor point to the center of the layer while holding the control or command key. This way, the anchor point will be snapped to the center. Now let's release the mouse click and then the control key. After using the anchor point tool, don't forget to switch back to the selection tool. Okay, now let's move on and create the second text. For that, we can simply duplicate this layer and change the text and the design later on. To duplicate the layer, we'll use the short cut control. Now let's drag the new layer downwards while holding down the shift key. This way we can drag it in a straight axis. Let's double click on this layer and change the text animation. Hold the shift key and type the letter A to make it upper case. Now release the shift key and continue typing the rest of the word. Now double click on the text to select it all and change the font to Ezra. Let's choose this style because we'll be using this Fanta lot. Let's mark it with the star. This way we can access it more quickly in future sessions. Next, let's change the font size to 100 or 120. And press Enter. Let's make sure the text is aligned to the center. Let's go to Paragraph and make sure the text is aligned to the center and the writing direction is left to right. And using the aligned tool, let's center the text in the composition. As you can see, the anchor point of this layer is not centered this time. Instead of centering it manually using the Anchor Point tool, we'll do it with the useful shortcut control. Alt, Home Mac users will need to work a bit harder to use this shortcut. Also, don't forget that all shortcuts will work only when the language on your computer is set to English. If so, let's press Control Alt home. There you go. The anchor point. Jump to the center of the layer. Now let's go back to the selection tool and move the text here. Now I want both texts to occupy exactly the same area. They should be resized to match each other's size. To do this, we can use guides to create guides. We need to display the rulers. We can display the rulers by opening the guides and grids list here, and then select the rulers, or by using the shortcut control. Now to create a guide, let's click here on the ruler and drag the first guide from it. You can place it here. Let's create another guide and place it here. Next, let's select this layer and change its size using the scale perimeter. But instead of opening this parameter manually, we can simply select the layer and press the key. Now click here on the value once and use the arrow keys to increase the size to 105. Then click here to finish the operation. Great, and now we can hide the rulers. To do this, press controller once again. To get rid of the guides, go to view and select clear guides. Now let's center these two layers in the composition. To do it precisely, we can use the helpful guide called Title Safe Action. The short cut for this guide is the apostrophe key. Get used to this short cut because we will use it a lot. All right, so now I can see where the center of the composition is. Now let's select both layers like this and move them upwards using the arrow keys. If we press the shift key while doing this, the text will move in larger increments. With this, we've finished designing the first scene, and we're ready to animate it. 5. Let's Animate the First Scene: Let's learn how to animate this scene. In order to create this animation, we need to convert this text layer into a shaped layer. Similar to how we convert a text layer to an outlined layer using create outlines, an illustrator after this action, we get a shape with a path that we can move and modify. After that we will use an effect called trim path and animate one of its parameters. If you're wondering why we can't simply use the trim path effect now it's because if we don't convert the text to a path, we won't be able to achieve that. Even if we activate the stroke for this text layer and try to add the trim path, we will see that this effect doesn't appear here. Okay, I'll bring all back to normal in order to convert this text layer into a shape layer with a path right click on it. Go to Create and choose Create Shapes from Text. The text layer will be automatically turned off. We don't need it for now, so we can enable the shy function to it. Now let's go to the fill of this shape and turn it off. Then go to Stroke, and choose the dark color from the palette. Now change the thickness to one. Let's click here to see how it looks great. Now let's zoom in a bit. Either by using the scroll wheel or by pressing these keys, I see that it's too thin. Let's set the stroke to two and press Enter. Now let's duplicate this layer using control D. Then place this layer below the first one. This will be the layer that will be colored after the stroke animation is finished. Because after the stroke is drawn, we want to reveal the entire word. Let's activate the fill on this layer. Choose the dark color and this time turn off the stroke. Now we have one layer with the text filled with color and an additional layer with only the stroke. For now, let's turn off the layer with the fill and focus on the animation of the text layer with the stroke. To do that, let's open this layer, select the contents, go to Add, and choose the trim paths effect. Now let's open the Effect and expand this panel for convenience. Now if I move the parameter called end, you'll see that the stroke disappears and reappears. This is the parameter we're going to animate. We will do it by creating key frames. What are key frames? Key frames are a fundamental concept in animation and motion graphics, in after effects. Key frames are used to define the starting and ending points of an animation or transition. They are points in time that mark the position, size, rotation, opacity, and other properties of an element or layer. Key frames are also used to control the speed and timing of an animation. By adjusting the distance between key frames. You can control the speed of animation by adjusting the timing of key frames. You can control the spacing and rhythm of animation. Okay, so first things first, before animating the parameter, let's make sure the time indicator is at the beginning of the timeline. Now let's decide so that at this time point at the zero second, the value of this parameter will be zero. In order to give the command to after effects, we need to create a key frame. To create key frames, click on the stopwatch icon for this parameter. There you created your first key frame. Now let's move to the second number two and decide so that at this time point, the value of this parameter will be 100. Once we create the first keyframe for a specific parameter and then change its value along the timeline, additional key frames with the new value will be automatically created for us. Therefore, we see the second key frame created without clicking the stopwatch icon. In order to see what we have achieved, let's place the time indicator at the beginning of our time line and press the Spacebar. Great job. You have created your first animation. Now let's place the time indicator here and see how we can make this animation a bit more interesting. We can do this by creating key frames for an additional parameter called offset. As you can see, as soon as I move it, the line starts to move. I'll set it back to zero. And let's animate it together. First, let's go to the beginning of the animation. And set it up so that at this time the value of this parameter will be zero. At the second number two, we'll set it up so that this parameter will make a full rotation. Let's see how it looks now. While the line is being drawn, it also moves. Next we will make our animation a bit more interesting by transforming our regular key frames into as key frames. What are a key frames? *** is a type of key frame interpolation that helps you achieve smooth and natural looking motion. When you apply AsE's to a key frame, it adds gradual acceleration and acceleration to the animation, making it appear more natural. To convert these keyframes to as key frames. We will select them and press the nine key. Mac users, hold down the F and key while pressing nine. Let's do that and see how it looks. Now looks nice. Let's close all the layer parameters and move on. Now let's find the right moment in the timeline where the filled text layer should enter the scene. Let's say we want it to start entering the scene slightly before all the strokes are drawn. To see where the animation of the stroke ends, we can select this layer and press the UK. This way we can see all the key frames that exist on this layer. Now let's place the time indicator here and decide that this layer will enter the frame from this point forward. Let's turn back on this layer and the parameter. We will create key frames for this time will be the opacity parameter. To quickly access this parameter, we can simply select the layer and press the key. At this time point in time, the value of this parameter should be zero. To give after effects the command, we'll click on the stopwatch icon for this parameter and create the key frames with this value. At the second number 2.15 frames, which is exactly 1 second after the first key frames, we'll change the value to 100. And we'll also convert these key frames into as key frames. Question what is the shortcut to convert a linear key frame into an *** key frame? We'll do it by selecting the key frame and pressing the F nine key. Let's see how it looks. Great job. Okay, so we've animated the layers. Now I want to teach you something very important. Let's say later in the video, we'll need to move this animation to the side. If I move this layer, the fill layer won't move with it, then I'll have to move it as well. I'll press control Z to undo the action. To make both layers move together, we can link the bottom layer to the top layer using the parent and link function found here. Parenting and linking are both powerful tools and after effects that allow you to control the motion of one layer or property based on the motion of another. Parenting is a relationship between two layers in which one layer the child is attached to and follows the motion of another layer, the parent parent a layer to another layer. Any motion or transformation applied to the parent layer is also applied to the child layer. This is useful for creating complex animations such as characters or vehicles, where the movement of one part affects the movement of another. Linking on the other hand, is a more flexible relationship that allows you to control one property or parameter of a layer based on another. In our case, we need to parent one layer to another. To do that, we'll drag the pick whip of this layer into this layer. Now every time I move the top layer, the bottom layer will move with it. All right, I'll press control Z. Now it's time to move on and start to animate this text layer. But before that, let's turn off these two layers so they don't get in our way and proceed. Now let's talk about the two main methods to animate this text layer to achieve the result we see in the example. The first involves separating each letter and animating them individually, which is a manual process. The second and more efficient method is to use text animators and after effects. Let me show you the manual method first, real quick. First of all, I need to duplicate this layer as many times as the number of letters in this word. Then I need to leave one letter from the word on each layer. Next, I have to arrange their position and animate them one by one and create the timing between them manually. As you can see, it is a very long and cumbersome way. I hope you got my point. I did a lot of actions for such a simple animation. Therefore, we won't do it this way. We'll do it in a much smarter and faster way using the text animators. First, let's open the layer. We can close that and enlarge this panel a bit. Now we just have to select the text and open up the animate list. From here, we need to choose which property will be in our first animator. In our, since we want the text to move from one place to another, we'll choose the position property for our first animator. Here we can see that an animator has been created. The first thing we need to do is set the range selector of this animator. This means that now we will decide where we want the text to be at the end or at the beginning of this animator. Let's set to be here below. For now, we can change it later at any time. For now, we're just trying to see what works best for us. Let's bring it down a bit. Let's bring the text even further down. Let's write 120. Now we've set a certain position for the text. Let's scale down the preview screen and enlarge this panel. Now we need to open the range selector and also open the advanced properties. Now we will control the text based on the value we set in the range selector. We will do it by changing the offset parameter. This means when the offset is set to zero, it means that the text will be located at the value we set to the range selector. And if we set the offset to 100, the text will be located at its original position, which is where it was before we set the value in the range selector. But if I move this value all the way down to -100 the text will end up in its original position. And that's not what we're going for. To fix it, we need to change how this animator functions. And we can do that by changing the shape of this animator to ramp up. Now when the offset is set to -100 the text position is based on the value we set to the range selector. When the offset is set to 100, the text returns to its original position. Now we can set key frames to the offset property to create the animation we want. Let's make sure we are at the beginning of the timeline and create a key frame with the value of -100 Now let's move to second number one and change the offset to 100. While working with text animators, we can change the easing of the key frames here. Instead of using the nine shortcut, set it to 85, 85, and see how that looks. Don't worry if you feel a bit confused. We will do this many times in the course. Eventually you will understand it much better. All right, now let's move on and learn how to make the text invisible. When it's at the bottom, I want it to be visible only when it reaches its original position up here. To do this, we need to find a point in time where the text has already finished its animation and is in its final position. Now right click on it, go to Mask and create a new mask. Now when the text is at the bottom, we won't see it. If after creating the mask you still see the text. You can change its location without messing up the animation simply by changing the value for the range selector. Adjust the range selector and check your animation looks nice. All right, moving on now let's bring back the two layers. Now I want this animation to start only after this text has finished its animation. Let's say at this time point in the second number 1.15 frames. Let's move it while holding the shift key so that the layer aligns with the time indicators position. Let's see how it looks. Looks good. Once we finish the animation for this section, we can apply our chosen pink color from the color palette to the text. Select this layer, go to the character tab, and use the eyedropper to pick the pink color from the palette. Let's also turn off the background of the previous screen and move on. Now let's animate the rest of the layers. This text will go up and this text go down. First, let's find the point in time where we want to start animating the layers. Let's see where the animation ends. That is where the last key frames are to display all the key frames we have in the scene. Make sure you don't select any layer and press the U key here. I see that the key frames are located here, meaning the animation of these layers is finished here. Now we will select this layer and that layer, but not this one. Why not this one? Because we connected this layer to that layer, which means that when we move this layer, the second layer will move along with it. Because of that, let's select both of these layers and open the position parameter for both of them. For that, we press the key. Now we'll create key frames with the current value, because at this point in time we want the text to remain here. But in a second. Number four, this layer will go here. Above. We will move it while holding the shift key. We will move this layer downward also while holding the shift key. Now let's select the key frames we created and press F nine to convert them to *** key frames. It looks a bit boring. To make the motion more interesting, we can change the behavior of this animation. We will do this using the graph editor, right click, and make sure you are using the speed graph editor. Now let's select both of these key frames and drag the handle here. Let's also select both of these key frames and move the handle here. Let's see how it looks. Now the text starts moving slowly at first, then it gains a lot of speed. Finally, it slows down towards the end. Note that the duration of the animation hasn't changed. We just change the velocity of the key frames and not the duration of the animation. Now let's go back to our timeline and learn how to change the velocity without entering the graph editor and adjusting the handles manually. For this, we do need to select all the key frames, Hold down the alt key and double click on one of the key frames. This will bring up the keyframe velocity panel. Let's enter 85 for both and press okay, let's see how it looks. It looks good. All right, so the first scene is ready and we can now proceed to the next one, where we create a three text animation. 6. Animtating the Second Scene and Rendering the Project: Okay, so first of all, let's create the text. We'll choose the text tool and write. Let's now select all the text and change the color to blue. Make sure the text is centered and the writing direction is from left to right. Next, let's align the text to the center of the composition using a line. Press here and here. And if we zoom in a bit, we can see that the anchor point of this layer is not centered in the layer. Let's use the shortcut. We learn to do that and press control all at home. Now, because we know that we are currently preparing the second scene in order to maintain the project organized, let's nest this layer into a new precomp. What is precomps? Precomposing is the technique used to group layers together and treat them as a single layer. It is a very useful tool in after effects that can simplify your timeline and help you organize your project. One of the main advantages of precomposing layers is that it allows you to keep your time line organized and easy to manage. By grouping related layers together, you can reduce clutter and make it easier to navigate and edit your project. Let's precompose this text layer together. We can do it in several ways. We can write, click on the layer and choose Precompose. Or we can use the short cut and press control shift C. Now let's give the new pre comp a name. Let's call it, let's go comp, make sure both are selected, and click okay. There you have it. A new composition is created, which we can also see in the project panel. If we enter it, we can see the text layer we created. This will make it much more convenient for us to create the second scene. Now let's go back to the selection tool, set the preview screen to fit. Now let's turn this text layer into a three D layer by clicking on this icon here. For those who don't see it, you can click here. Let's click on the three D icon. There you go. The layer has become a three D layer. But if we change the previews view angle from active camera to custom view one, we'll see that the text doesn't have the three D volume. To do this, we need to switch the software's rendering engine from classic three D renderer to Cinema Four D renderer. For those who don't see it in the preview panel, you can press control K to access the composition settings we are currently in. Now go to Three D Renderer and change the renderer from here. Let's click Okay and continue. As you can see, for now, nothing has changed. But if we open the Layers properties, we'll see that a new property called Geometry Options has been added. Let's open that. Now I want to show you how it would look if we hadn't switched the renderer. I switch it back to classic three D and as you can see the geometry options parameter is not active, that's why we switch to the cinema Four D renderer. Okay, So now in order to create the three dimensional volume, we need to increase the value for the extrusion depth property. Let's set it to 35. That should be enough. The larger we make it, the more difficult it will be to render the scene, which will slow down the computer and the software. Okay, now let's add color to the sides. For that, we need to select the text from here, go to Animate, then to side the color, and choose RGB. Now let's select the color palette through the projects panel so that we can see the colors. And we'll change the color using the eye dropper to gray beautiful. Now we can close the layer and move on. If we change our preview angle from costume view one to top view, we can see that the anchor point of this layer is not centered. Let's select the anchor point tool and move the anchor point from the Zaxisow. Let's switch back to active camera to see the scene from a regular angle. Also, don't forget to switch back to the selection tool. All right, now we are ready to animate this scene. But before that we can enlarge this panel, set the preview to fit, and let's animate this layer. Our goal is to animate the layer moving towards the camera, which requires animating the position property. Let's press the key. As you can see, because we turn this layer into a three dimensional layer, we added a new axis of movement in addition to left and right. Down and up, we can move the text closer or further away from the camera. I'll press controls a few times. Let's animate it together. Let's set that at this point in time, the position of the text will be here. After 2 seconds, the text will move closer to the camera. In order to move this layer in larger increments, we can hold down the shift key while changing the value of the Z axis in order for the text to pass exactly in the middle. We can also move it along the x axis, that means shifting it sideways. Since we are dealing with three D layers, the project may work very slowly to help after effects preview the scene, we can lower the quality of the preview. Here, let's choose quarter. Now we'll see the scene slightly more pixilated and with lower quality. But after effects will work faster. And continue moving the layer forward and arrange the movement so that the text passes exactly through the center. Let's see how it looks. Let the software render the scene for a few seconds. Now to make the movement smoother, let's change the key frames to easy ease. Let's see it again one more time. Looking good. After we finish with this word, let's create the animation for the second word. To do this, we can duplicate this text layer using control D. Then we can temporarily turn off this layer. Now let's press here twice. And change the word to go hold down the shift key to write it in capital letters. Let's change the color of this text to yellow. Now go back to the selection tool and see how the movement we created looks with this text. Now let's make the text pass through the letter O. For this, we need to adjust the animation of this layer a bit. To change this animation, we need to see its key frames. Let's press you to do that. Now let's go to the last keyframe. Hold down the shift key while moving the time indicator so that it snaps exactly to the key frame. To achieve the desired result, it's crucial to change the value only when the time indicator is placed in the specific key frame. We want to change the value for now, we can change the value of this keyframe. Let's move the layer backward and adjust its position to make the layer get out of the frame through the letter O. You can also click on the value you want to change and adjust it using the up and down arrows on the keyboard. Once done, let's review the outcome. Now let's turn on both layers and bring the time indicator here so we can see the layers. We can place this layer here. Now let's create a cool entrance animation for these layers by using a scaling animation. Let's make sure we are at the beginning of the timeline. Select both layers and press the S key. Now let's decide that at this time the size of the layers will be zero. Let's change the value and create a key frame with this value. At frame number 15, we will set the size of the layers to 100% Let's convert these key frames to as, turn off one of the layers and see how the animation we created Looks looks good. Now let's time the two layers to enter the scene one after the other. For this, let's move the time indicator forward in time so we can see both of the layers. Now let's move the Go text layer forward in time. Let's see how it looks. I think we need to move it a bit more. Let's see it now. Maybe even a little more. Okay, let's move this layer to the second number, 1.15 frames. Yes, that's better. The two layers have already left the scene. We don't need this part of the time line anymore. Let's shorten it to the end of these layers animation. For this, we need to see the key frames of all the layers. Let's make sure we're not selecting anything. Question, which key should we press to see the key frames on the layers? Press the U key there. We can see that the last keyframe is here, which means the animation ends here. Let's place the time indicator here to shorten the time line. So called the work area. We'll move it manually or use the short cut the end key. Now let's right click here and choose trim comp to work area. When we go back to the main composition, we can see that this pre comp has indeed been shortened. Now what's left to do is simply time the animation in this pre comp with the animation of the first scene. We can bring the pre comp down here and move it relative to the animation of the first scene. Let's place it roughly here. Give it a few seconds to render the preview. Looks nice. Now let's create the background for this. We'll use a layer called solid. There are two ways to create a new solid layer. You can right click here, go to New, and select Solid. Or we can do it with the short cut control. Let's change the color of the solid to the bright color from the palette using the eyedropper. Now place the solid below all the layers before we render the scene. Let's delete the unnecessary layers in it. Let's click here to see the hidden layers. We can unlock the color palette and erase it using the backspace or delete key. Let's also delete this text layer. Now let's shorten the work area here because there is nothing happening here. Therefore, we don't need this entire section to shorten the work area. Let's place the time indicator here and press in. In this case, we don't need to crop and adjust the work area because after effects will render only the selected work area boundaries. Okay, now let's see the entire animation from start to finish. Let's set the preview to fit. We'll turn off the grid, press the apostrophe key, and then press the Spacebar. Be patient, and give after effects some time to render the preview. It looks good and is ready for rendering. To render this scene, go to Composition and choose Add to render, or we can use the shortcut control M. This is the after effects render Q panel. First we need to decide which format we want to render this animation. We can do it by changing the output mode. Let's click here and now choose the H 0.264 40 megabits per second format, which gives us a high quality MP four file. Then in output two, we can choose where to save the file. Let's save it in the renders folder we created earlier. Now you can change the name of the file or leave it as it is. And then hit Save. And finally, let's hit the render button to render the animation. Let's wait a few moments now to see the render. We can open the output mode and click on the link here. Let's see how it looks. Looks nice. Now you can share it on social media or add it to your website portfolio. Okay. Now let's go back to the project and organize it. Before we close it, we can, we can also close this pre comp. Now let's go to the project panel and organize it using folders. Let's click here to create a folder and call it pre comps. Now let's make sure we don't select anything and create another folder named assets. Let's place here the color palette and the folder of the solid that was automatically created when we created the background. Now let's move the precomp we created, which is of course in our main composition, into the precomps folder. I recommend leaving the main composition outside to differentiate it from other compositions in the project. We can tag it with a blue color. Now let's press control as to save the project. Now you can close the project. I hope you enjoyed the lesson and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 7. Section 2: Wavy text Animation: Hey everyone. In this lesson, we will create a super cool animation using after effects text layer animators. We'll take a step by step approach and break it down into four parts. Here's the plan. First we'll make the text animation and learn how to loop it. Next, we'll dig into expressions and learn some nifty tricks to turn a simple animation into a stylish one. Then we'll discover some advanced techniques that will save us time. We'll create a dynamic background, render the scene, and organize the project. After that, we'll learn how to modify the animation we created and use more advanced techniques to make future changes easier. Finally, we'll improve the animation even more and render the final product. It's going to be awesome. Let's get started. 8. Getting better with text animators: Let's lunch after effects. You can close this window for all of us to see the same panel arrangements. Let's click on Default. Now let's create our first composition. We'll name it Text animation two. Now let's go to the Renderer, since in the previous lesson we changed the renderer to Cinema four D. Let's switch it back to classic three D. Now let's go back to Basic, and this time we'll work in full HD format, which means 1,920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels in height. We'll work with 30 frames per second. The duration of the composition will be 10 seconds. We'll change the background to black. Let's click okay, here and there. Okay, now let's import the color palette into the project. Let's click here to see the project panel. For convenience, let's set the preview screen to fit. Now let's bring the color palette into this project. For this double click on the gray area in the project panel. Locate the folder we created for the lesson and enter the Assets folder. Select the color palette and click on Import. Now we can save the project and give it a name. For this, let's use the shortcut control. So let's find the folder we created for the lesson. Next, go to the AE folder we created for the lesson. Now we can click on the after effects file of the first lesson. That way we will sample this name. Now all we need to do is to change it to number two. Great, now we can hit Save. All right, now let's create the text layer for that, we'll choose the text tool and write the word swag. Let's select the text. Go to the character tab and change the text color to white. Next, change the font to Montserrat. Choose the extra bold style. And save this font for quick access, because we'll use it in future lessons on second thought, let's change the style to black and set the size to 150. Let's press here so that all the letters are uppercase. Now let's go to paragraph and make sure our text is aligned to the center and the writing direction is left to right. Now let's go to a line and click here and here to center the layer in the composition. Now let's center the anchor point of the text layer. We'll do it using a useful shortcut control, Alt Home Mac users pay attention to how you do it on your keyboard. Let's press control Alt Home. And there you go, the anchor point. Jump to the center. Great. Now let's go back to the selection tool using the shortcut V and start to animate the text. As we learned in the previous lesson, animate it using the animators that after effects offers us when working with text layers. To use the text, animators first open the text layer, select the text, and then choose the position animator because that's what we want the text to do. Move from top to bottom. Now the first thing we need to do is set the range selector value, that is when the text starts or ends the animation. Let's set the position of the text at the bottom. We can change it at any stage later in the project. For now, we're just trying to see what works best for us. Let's write 120. Great, now let's open range selector one and the advanced properties. Let's enlarge this panel a bit. Now we can change the animation shape of this animator from squared to ramp up. This way the movement of the text will start from the first letter to the last. Now to animate the text, we'll change the offset parameter at this time. At the second zero, let's set the offset to -100 After 2 seconds, we'll change the offset to 100. Let's see how it looks. As we learned when working with text animators, we can make these key frames s by pressing nine. Or we can set the velocity of the key frames by entering the numbers in these parameters Se high. Let's write 20, Se low, let's write 80. Now let's make the letters return back down in a wave shape. If I simply set the offset back to -100 the letters will return from the last letter and not from the first letter. Okay, I'll delete this keyframe, and let's see how we can do that. To achieve the wavy look, we can duplicate the animator and adjust the parameters. So select it and press control D. Now let's open it. Just some parameters. The first thing we need is to change the range selector from 120 to -120 This way the text will move in the opposite direction. Next we need to see the key frames of both animators. Select the layer and press you. Now we need to move the key frames of animator two to start 1 second after animator one. In other words, the animation of the second animator will begin 1 second after the animation of the first animator. Now let's close the layer and reopen it to access all the parameters of the animators. We'll go to the second animator and also reverse the velocity. We'll set the as high to 80 and the s low to 20. Now let's learn how to make this wave animation repeat itself and make another wave. For this, we need to duplicate the first animator. Because in this animator, the text performs the upward animation. But first, let's change the name of this animator. Select it, press enter and name it Animator up. Let's call the animator that makes the text go, the animator, because this is the animator responsible for the downward movement of the text. Now let's duplicate the up animator, Select it, press control D, and move it downwards. This animation should start after the previous one. Let's select the layer and press you. Now let's select these key frames and move them to the position of the time indicator while holding the shift key. Let's see how it looks. Great. Now let's make another wave and make the text go down. One more time question. Which animator should we duplicate to achieve this? To achieve that, we will duplicate the down animator press control and move it downwards. Press you to view the key frames. Select the key frames of the new animator and place them exactly in the middle of the previous animators animation. Let's see what we got. Okay, now let's make this animation play in a perfect loop. What is a loop animation? A loop animation is a type of animation where the beginning and end of the animation seamlessly blend together, creating an infinite loop. In other words, the animation plays continuously without any discernible start or end point. As you can see, the text currently starts. Its animation completes it, and stops if we want it to continue playing. First we need to find two identical frames at the beginning and end of the animation. This. Let's go to the second, number one, when the text is already in motion. Now let's position the work area at the same spot as the time indicator. We can either manually drag the work area or use the shortcut by pressing the B key. Now let's find the point in time where the text returns to this position. Again, I think it's somewhere around here. To be as precise as possible, we can use the take snapshot function for this. Let's reach our first frame and press take snapshot. Now let's try to find a frame similar to what we captured. To compare this frame to the first frame, we need to click here. It doesn't look similar. Let's continue searching. We're getting closer. Let's move to the second number three. There we find the right frame. Now what's left is to finish the work area. At this time point, we can drag it manually or use the shortcut. Now when we play the animation, we'll only see what exists within the boundaries of the work area. Pay attention when the time indicator reaches here. It will immediately start playing the animation from the beginning. Because we found two completely identical frames. At the start and end of the animation, we created a perfect loop. We won't notice when the video ends and when it starts again. Now I want to show you what would happen if we set the work area at a time point where the first and last frames are not identical. Let's say we finished the work area here. As you can see, an unpleasant jump occurs. Therefore, it is very important when creating loops to use take snapshot. Okay, I'll bring everything back to normal and now we'll learn how to cut the layer. We can manually cut the layer like this or use the short cut alt and left bracket. Now let's position the time indicator at the end of the work area while holding the shift key, cut the layer from the end. We'll press Alt and the right bracket. And to make the animation look more interesting, we can select the text and add some dots on the sides of the text. Double click the text. Now click here and add three dots at the end of the word and at the beginning. Let's see how it looks. I think it looks cool, but you don't have to do it. Okay, now let's learn how to make this animation play for more than 2 seconds. See you in the next part. 9. Learn how to loop the scene: To make this animation play for more than 2 seconds. First of all, let's move the work area segment to the beginning of the timeline. We'll also need to move the layer itself here. Do it while holding the shift key. Now we can expand the work area, close the layer, and move on. Now we need to nest this layer into a pre comp. We can use the shortcut control shift to do it. Now, change the name to Swag comp. After that, make sure both are selected and press okay. And don't forget to switch back to the selection tool. Now, as you can see, the borders of this layer are really large. There is a lot of empty space here. In order to reduce the size of this pre comp, we need to enter it. Now press control K to access the composition setting of this pre comp. Make sure preview is checked and decrease the dimensions of this comp. I think 1,000 in width should be fine for the height. I believe 500 is good press. Okay, and let's place this layer in the center of the composition. To see the center of the composition, we can press the apostrophe key and use the action title, Safe Guide. Now drag the layer here. You can move around with the time indicator to see that the text stays within the boundaries of the composition. And we don't move this layer too much. I think we can move it up a bit. Let's check it one more time. All right, great. We can move on now. Now let's go back to the main composition and learn how to make this pre play endlessly. Because now the animation ends after 2 seconds. Because we've created a pre comp that starts and ends at the same frame, we can make this precomp play in an endless loop using an expression. What is expression? Expression is a piece of code that you can use to automate and control various properties of your animation. It is a powerful tool that enables you to create complex animations without having to key frame every single element manually. Let's get closer a little bit. In our case, we will use a loopout expression to create a loop expression for a pre comp that starts and ends with the same frame as ours. The first thing we need to do to place the time indicator at the end of this layer. Now right click, go to time and enable time remapping. You may see that the layer is still cut off in this way. That's okay, we'll fix it in a moment. What's more important is that after we click Enable time remapping, we need to move one frame backward and create an additional key frame before the existing one. To do this, click here. Now we need to delete the last keyframe, select it, and press Backspace. Now we'll create an expression for these keyframes. To do this, we need to hold down the Alt key and click on the stopwatch. This will open the expression editor. We don't need to write anything, We'll use a built in expression for this. Let's click on the small arrow here, Go to Property, and select this expression. To finish the operation, let's click here on the side. We can step back a bit. And now let's extend this layer to the end of the composition. Now everything that happens between these key frames, which is the entire animation, will keep repeating until the end of the composition, making the entire animation play endlessly next. Because we know that we will duplicate this composition several times soon, and each one will be in a different color. We need to apply an effect called fill to this composition. Let's go to the effects panel and type fill. Now let's drag the effect onto the composition. Now to color it with the colors of the palette, let's go back to the project panel and port it into the scene, and scale it down while holding the shift key. Let's place it here. Now let's select the precomp again and go to Effects controls. If you don't see this panel, you can activate it through window. All right, so select the eye dropper. And select the bright color from the palette. Now let's add a cool stroke to the text precomp. To do this, we can right click on the Layer, go to Layer Styles, and select Stroke. There you have it. There is the stroke. Now let's scroll down a bit until we see the layer styles parameter. Let's open the stroke here and change it a bit. Hide the background so we can see what we're doing. Let's change the color to the dark color, from the palette and the thickness of the stroke to five. Now let's close all the properties of the layer and move on. But before, let's press control S to save the project. All right, now let's duplicate this composition using a shortcut control D. Now let's create a small offset between these two layers. And move this pre compa, bit forward in time. Zoom in a bit, and move the bottom layer three frames forward. Three frames are too much. Let's move it a bit closer. That looks better. Next, let's change the color of this bottom layer. Let's enlarge the preview panel. Hold down the Spacebar, and drag the preview screen here until we see the color palette. Alternatively, we can simply select it. From here, press P to bring up the position parameter and move this layer here until we see it next to the text. Now let's select the bottom layer and change the color of the fill effect to blue. Now let's duplicate it again. Press control D. Move the bottom layer, two frames forward. Now let's change the color to yellow. Duplicate it again. Move it two frames forward, and change the color to pink. Let's do it one last time. Duplicate it. Move it two frames forward, and this time sample the dark color from the palette. Now let's set the preview to fit. Create a loop for this animation. You might notice that the animation at first looks a little strange. That's because the bottom layers got moved around in the timeline. Let's see how we can fix this. First, let's go to a point in time where we see all the layers together. For example, here. Now let's select all the layers. Right click, Go to Markers and select Add Marker. This way we can know that this is the starting point for each of the layers. In order to create a perfect loop like we did before when we created the text animation. Let's find a point in time where the text reaches the same position as it was at the beginning. Question, what tool can help us to create a perfect loop? We will use the take snapshot tool. Let's take a snapshot of this frame. Now let's go to the second number eight, not the third second because the video will be very short that way. Okay, let's stand here with the time indicator and compare this frame to the first frame we had. That's not good. Let's check this frame. We'll continue doing this until we reach the perfect moment. Here it is, at the eighth, second, and four frames. Let's create a marker here as well. Now let's shorten the work area here using the end key. Now let's go back to the point we marked in the beginning and shorten the work area from here as well, using the B key. Now we have created a perfect loop. Meaning that when the animation reaches this point, it will start playing from the beginning without us noticing when it happened. Let's press the Spacebar and see how it looks. Looks great. Now let's delete the color palette. We don't need it anymore to prepare for the next step. Let's clean up our scene. First, we'll move the time indicator to the beginning of the work area while holding the shift key. Now well select all the layers, Then we'll use the shortcut alt and left bracket to cut this section of the layers. Next we'll place the work area and all the layers at the beginning of the timeline. Great job. Now let's move on to the next step where we'll discover time saving methods for editing text layers and after effects. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes, get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 10. Work smarter : Welcome back. Please note, in case we want to scale up this comp, it might become pixilated and lose quality. To avoid this, we can activate the collapse function for this layer. The collapse transformations function is a powerful feature in after effects that allows you to maintain the quality and scalability of vector or three D layers. When nested inside a pre composition. It gives you more flexibility in working with complex compositions And helps ensure that your designs remain sharp and visually appealing. If I turn on this function for our pre comp, you'll notice a major improvement in the quality right away. All right, I will bring it back to 100. If you don't see this icon, you can click here. Let's apply the collapse function to all layers. Now let's say we want to move the text to another location. If we move this layer, the other layers will remain in place. Let's see what we need to do so that all of them move along with the first layer. We need to select all layers except the first one and use parent and link to link them to the first layer. Let's drag the pick whip of all layers to the first layer like this. Now when we move the first layer, the rest of the layers will move with it. All right, let's set the preview to fit. Now let's select the first pre comp press and increase the size of the layers to 150. As you can see, after scaling the layers, the stroke did not scale proportionally, which made it appear thinner. If we want to make it thicker, instead of opening each layer manually and adjusting the size property that controls the stroke thickness, we can find this property using the search bar to display it for all layers. Let's select all of them. Type size in the search bar and press Enter. Now you will see the size property which is associated with the stroke parameter found in the layer styles. Let's enlarge this panel. Instead of changing the thickness one by one, we can link these properties just as we link the layers before. As you can see next to size there is a pick whip. This means we can link this property to any other property. Let's link the size of this layer to the size of the first layer. Now let's do the same for the rest of the layers. Now we control the line thickness of all the layers to one layer. This will make it much easier for us to handle changes in the future. Let's change it to six. We can do the same thing for the property that controls the color of the stroke. For this, let's delete the word size from the search bar. Select all the layers, type color here, and press Enter. Okay, we just need to figure out which exact color we're talking about. Out of all the options here, we can see that this color belongs to the fill effect, which is not what we need. Here we have a color that belongs to stroke, which is the one we're looking for. Let's link all the color properties of this layer to the color of the first layer like this. Let's do the same for the rest of the layers. Now if we need to make changes in the future, we don't have to do it for each layer separately. We control this property through one layer. Okay, let's close the search bar, save the project, and move on. Now let's create this cool animated background that we see in the example. First we need to create a solid. Click here, go to New, and select Solid. Let's choose the blue color Enter here and darken it a bit. Now click Okay. Here and here. Now let's bring the solid we created below, all the layers. Next to create the grid, go to Effects and search for the effect called grid. Drag the effect onto our solid. And let's change its parameters first to see both the grid and the solid. Let's change the blending mode to multiply. Now let's change the color of the grid to the dark color from the color palette. To make this grid symmetrical, we've got two choices. We can either change it using corner point or control it with slider. Now with the slider, we can make the grid bigger or smaller, so it stays symmetrical. Let's set it to 140. Then we can control the thickness of the grid lines. Let's change it to five. Now to animate the grid, we need to change the value of a parameter called anchor. We can also move at using the small handle located here. Let's drag it here. While holding down the shift key, let's set key frames for this parameter. Make sure you are at the beginning of the timeline. And create a key frame. To see the key frame we created, let's select the layer and press you. Now let's go to the end of the animation and move the grid to the side. Let's drag this small handle here while holding down the shift key. Let's see what we've got. Let after effects a few seconds to render the preview. All right, did you notice a slight jump in the background when the animation started playing again? I'll zoom in a bit so we can see it better. Pay attention to what happens in this area. It happened because the grid didn't loop properly. To create a loop for the grid, we need to move it in a way that it reaches the same point as it appeared at the beginning of the animation. We already know how to do that. Let's capture a snapshot of the frame at the beginning of the animation using take snapshot. Now let's go to the end of the animation and see if the position of the grid is correct. As you can see, the grid at the end of the animation doesn't look the same as it did at the beginning. To make it look the same as in the beginning, we need to adjust the last keyframe and move the grid slightly to the side. Let's compare it. Now We're getting very close. It is very important to hover over the key frame we want to change when we change the value. Let's move it a bit more there. We hit the point perfectly. Let's see it again. With that, we have finished animating the scene and we are ready to render the animation. Let's close this layer. Now to render this scene, we can use the shortcut control M. Now we are in the after effects render panel. Here we see which composition we are rendering. Let's choose to render it in H 0.264 format, which is an MP four file. Now let's choose to save the file and the renders folder we created. We can leave the name as it is right now, which is the name of the composition. I have no problem with that. Let's click on Save and then click on the Render button. Let's wait until the render is complete. Now to see the render, we just need to head over to the output mode and click on the link here. It'll take us right to the folder with the video file. Then we can watch it and make sure everything looks good. Great, Now I want us to get back to the project and learn how to make changes in case we want to change something in the design or the animation of the text. But before learning how to make changes, let's organize our project first. For that, let's go back to the project panel. If you don't see it here, you can click on the arrows here and select Project. All right, so first let's create a new folder called Assets. Now click here to ensure you are not selecting anything and create another folder, We call it pre comps. Now into the Assets folder, we will drag the color palette and the solids folder. Let's drag this precomp into the precomps folder. Finally, let's label the main composition in blue. Great, now let's close the effects and presets tab and press control S to save the project. Now we are ready to move on to the final part of this lesson. See you there. 11. Learn how to deal with changes: If we want to switch up the way our text moves around, we got to get into the pre comp of the text animation. Now we need to open the layer and change the range selector of the animator called position. But instead of opening all the animators and finding this property manually, we can select the layer and type the name of the property we are looking for in the search bar. Now we see all the properties with the name position. Of course, we are referring to the positions of the animators and not the position of the layer transforms. Now we can change all the animators. In the up animators, let's write 150. And in the down animators we'll write -150 If we want to exaggerate the animation even more, we can change the positions to 180. Let's see how it looks. I think it looks great. Now let's go back to the main composition and see how it looks together with the other pre comps. Let after effects render the preview for a minute. Looks great. Okay, now let's see what we need to do if we want to change the offset of all the layers. Let's say we want the offset to be a bit bigger. To do this, let's go to a point in time where we can see all the layers. Now select all the layers except for the first one. We'll select that layer, hold down the shift key, select the last layer, and move everything two frames forward. Now let's hold down the control key and click on that layer to deselect it. Then we'll move those layers, two frames forward as well. Let's repeat this action a few times. Now, as you can see, we have created a more extreme offset between the layers. Now in order to maintain the perfect loop, let's create new markers according to the new animation. Let's hover over here with the time indicator. Select all the layers. Right click. Go to Markers and delete all the markers we currently have. Then right click again and create new markers. Now let's capture this frame. Next, we'll try to find that same frame as in the beginning. There I found the point in time where the frame looks exactly the same as in the beginning. Now let's create markers here as well. Now let's cut this layer from here using the alt and the left bracket shortcut. Let's bring all these layers back to the beginning of the timeline and see what we've got. There. You have it. We've created a new loop that works perfectly fine. Now let's see what we need to do to change the behavior of the text animation. For that, we need to go back to the text pre comp and change some properties in the animators. For now, let's close all the animators. Now let's open the range selector of this animator and also open the advanced settings. These are the two properties we need to change to make our animation behave differently in this case as well, Instead of manually finding these properties for each animator, we can type ease in the search bar and press enter. Now we can see these properties for all the animators. Since we have two animators of the same type, animator up, animator up two. We can link the properties of animator up two to the properties of animator up. Let's drag the pick whip of s high of animator up two and link it to ease high of animator up one. Let's do the same with low. Now let's connect animator down two with animator down. We'll connect these two properties to the ones we have here. Now we have control over the behavior of the text animation through these animators. And the rest will automatically change. So let's set it to 90 here and ten here here. Let's set it to ten, and here to 90. Now the text moves in a more extreme way. We can go back to the main composition and see how it all looks together. If we don't like it, we can go back to the text and change the values. Both of these can be closed. Let's see how it looks. If we change the E's to 85 for both. Let's do the same thing here. Let's see how it looks in the main composition. To see the result faster, we can reduce the preview quality to quarter. Okay, now I'll bring the preview quality back to full. Let's go back to the text and bring back the ease to its original setting. One last thing we'll do before moving on is just like we link those properties, let's also link the position properties of the animators. Let's type position again in the search bar and press enter. Now let's link them between the animators. Let's take the position of animator up two to the position of animator up. Now let's link the position of animator down two to the position of animator down. Every time we change this, it will change accordingly. Every time we change this one, it will change accordingly as well. Just like we did with the S. Okay, let's close both of these animators and the search bar. Now let's change the font of the text. I'll change it to the Ezra font. Instead of searching for it manually, we can go to the saved fonts and select it from there. Now, click here, and with the up and down arrows on the keyboard, choose a different style. I will stick with bold. Now let's go back to the selection tool and see how it looks in the main composition. I don't like the current offset. I think it's too extreme. Let's practice it again and change the offset one more time. It's important for me to repeat the same actions, because that's how you'll learn this topic in the best way possible. Okay, let's select all these layers and move them two frames back. Now let's hold the control key and click on this layer to deselect it and move these layers two frames back. Let's repeat this action until the last layer. Make sure you didn't affect the loop of this animation. Let's see it from here. And try to find some unnecessary jumps when the animation is over and starts again. Great, it looks good. Now let's improve the visibility of this animation by moving the last layer to the side. Let's select these layers and press the right arrow on the keyboard while holding down the shift key. Hold the control key, and click on this layer to deselect it. Now let's move these layers to the right. Let's do the same for the rest of the layers. It looks a bit more interesting. Now let's enlarge the text a bit. For this, select only the first layer, press and set it to 150 or 160. The other layers will scale accordingly because we link them using the parent and link feature to the first layer. If you want to change something in the stroke of the text, simply type stroke in the search bar. Press Enter, and you will see the stroke parameters. Let's open it, and here you can change the thickness of the stroke or its color. This will change in the other layers as well, because we link these properties to the properties of the first layer. Now let's talk about the grid. If you want to make changes to the grid, you need to select the solid layer where the grid effect is applied. Then go to the effects controls and make the desired changes. If you want to change the background color, you need to select the solid layer and use the shortcut controls, Shift Y. This will take you to the settings of that solid layer, and from here you can easily change the color. Then click okay here and here. Now we are ready to render it again. Press control M, choose to render it in the H 0.264 format, which is an MP four file in output. To go to the folder named renders, let's select our last render so that the new render replaces it. Next, click on the render button and then hit Okay. Now we just need to wait until the rendering is complete to see the rendered output. Open the output mode and click on the link here. Let's open the video and see how it looks. Looks nice. Now you can use this animation in your future projects. You can easily replace the text and change the design or the animation in a more convenient and faster way. If you enjoy the course. I would greatly appreciate it if you could rate it and provide feedback. I know if you found the chorus interesting or not. Okay, now let's go back to the project. Let's save the project by pressing control. Now go back to the project panel. For those who don't see it, click on the arrows here and select Project. And that's it for this lesson. I hope you enjoyed it, and I can't wait to see you in the next lesson. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 12. Section 3: Vertical text animation: Hi there. In this lesson, we will create a super cool vertical text animation. We will continue learning about the text animators of text layers and after effects, but in a more advanced way. So far, we have created an animator with one position property. In this lesson, we will learn how to add and combine more than one property. We will break this lesson into three parts and cover some important stuff. In the first part, we will create a complex vertical text animation using a single animator with five different parameters. After that, we will learn how to convert the animation we created into a horizontal text line. Lastly, we will learn how to handle changes in the text and its size and then render the animation and organize the project. Before we close it, let's get started. It's going to be awesome. 13. Learn advanced text animators techniques: Welcome back. Let's lunch. After effects together, you can close this window. And to see the same panel arrangements, let's click on Default. Now let's create our first composition. We'll name it Text animation three. We'll work in the full HD format, which means 1,920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels in height. Set the frame rate to 30, 10 seconds for the duration. And we'll change the background to black. Then click okay, here and there. Okay, now let's import the color palette into the project. Double click on the gray area in the project panel, select the color palette, and click on Import. Now we can save the project and give it a name. Let's find the folder we created for the lesson. Enter the AE folder and give a name to the after effects file we're currently working on. You can select this project, so that the name will change and change the number to three. Then click on Save. Now let's create our first text layer. Let's choose the text tool, change the color to white. And to make this lesson more interesting, let's create vertical text. For that, click and hold the Text Tool and select the vertical type tool. Now let's click here once to open the text line and write typography. Now let's click twice on the text to select it. Before moving on, don't forget to enter the paragraph panel to ensure the text is aligned to the center and its writing direction is from left to right. All right. Now let's change the font to bell story. Next, change the font style to display heavy, set the size to 80, and press Enter. Now let's select the selection tool. Press the apostrophe key to open the grid and move the text here. Next, let's click here to convert all the letters to upper case. Now using the aligned tool, let's ensure that this layer is positioned at the center of the composition. Let's move the text slightly to the left. All right, now let's open the layer. Select the text and choose the position animator. Now I want to set that, this text will reach this specific point in the composition. To do it, we need to set a changing value for this animator. Which means we need to change the position property value in the range selector of this animator. Drag it until the text reaches the first line of the grid. We can type in 1085. Now let's open the range selector and advanced settings. We can enlarge this panel to see all the properties. For now, let's set the animation shape to ramp up this way. When the offset is at -100 the text will be in the position we set. And when the offset is at 100, the text will return to its original position. Okay, now let's set that at this point in the time line. At the second number zero, the offset will be 100. Let's create the first key frame. Now let's place the time indicator at the second number two and set the offset to -100 Let's see what we've got. As you can see, the text starts moving from its last letter. In this case it doesn't bother me because this time we will click here to make this animation random. This way the letters will start moving randomly. Now let's add additional parameters to the key frames we created with the offset. Currently we have one position parameter. Let's say that now we want to add a blur animation to the text. I can select the text, then go to Animate and create another animator with the blur property. But this way I will have to make all the changes to the new animator. As I did to the first one, there's a better way to add additional animation to the text. I'll delete this animator, and let's do it together. Instead of creating a new animator, we can add additional properties to our existing animator. Let's select the animator. Click on Ad, go to property and choose blur. Now let's set the change value for the blur to 30. Now these key frames refer to both properties in this animator. This animator refers to the position and the blur values. Now let's add another property. Let's choose opacity, because I want the text to disappear when it reaches here. Let's set the changing value to this parameter, right? Zero here. Now our animator will also refer to the data we gave to the position parameter, the data we gave to the blur parameter, and the data of the opacity parameter. Let's go crazy and add another parameter to the animation called character offset. Let's write ten here. What it does is scramble the letters in our text layer. Let's see how it all looks together. Okay, now let's make the movement a bit more interesting. By changing the ease of this animator, we can enlarge this panel to see more of the properties. Now open the range selector and the advanced settings and write 85 for both values. Let's see how it looks. I think it looks great. Now we can move on to create the second text layer, which is supposed to be on the other side of the scene. Then we will animate it and blend it with the animation we have created. For this, we can duplicate this layer using the control shortcut. Now let's move the new layer here. We'll drag it while holding the shift key. Next, let's click on this layer twice and change the word to animation. Now press control Enter to exit the text line. Go back to the selection tool and adjust the parameters of the animator. And this layer, because this layer has the same animator exactly as this layer, this text also moves to the side. Let's change a few things in our animator to reverse the direction of this animation. Open the animator to see all its parameters. First, we will change the animation direction in the position parameter. Instead of 1085, we'll change it to minus 1085. Now let's open the advanced section and also change the animation shape from ramp up to ramp down. Now let's see how it looks. You can turn off this layer to see it better. Okay, it looks good. We can turn this layer back on. Now let's make these layers enter one after the other. For this, we need to see all the key frames of both layers. Let's select both layers and press you. Now let's go to the end of the animation with the time indicator and cut the layers. Press salt and the right bracket key. Now drag the layer of the word animation a bit farther in time. Let's say to frame number 15. Let's see what we've got. Now let's improve the look of this scene and prepare it to play in an endless loop. For this, we need to place both of these layers into a pre comp. Let's select them and press Control Shift C. We'll call this text comp one. And hit Okay. Now let's create a new solid as a background layer. Right click here. Go to New and select Solid. Change the color to bright color from the palette. Press. Okay, and bring it down. Now let's enter the text pre comp, Select the palette from here so that we can see the colors again. Let's select both layers and change the color to dark color. You can turn off the background of the preview screen here so you can see it better. Let's go back to the main composition and see how it looks. Okay, now let's make the text, make the reverse motion. For that, we can duplicate the pre comp from here. Press control D. Next, drag the new pre comp to the end of the first one to make it play in reverse. Right click on it, go to time and choose time, reverse layer. What will happen now is that this pre comp will play from the end to the beginning altogether, it looks like this. When using this trick, it's very important to zoom in and make sure that the layers don't overlap each other and that they are not far apart from each other. All right, now let's zoom out and to see this animation play in a loop. Go to the end of this animation and shorten the work area. Let's press in. Let's see how it looks. Now we see the animation playing in a perfect loop. It looks great. Now let's learn how we can keep the same animation, but this time on a horizontally written text. And we will do it in the next part. So see you there. 14. Convert a vertical text animation to a horizontal: Welcome back. First, to create this animation on horizontally written text, let's duplicate this pre comp through the project panel. This way we will create the same pre comp, but if we make changes to it, we won't affect the existing pre comp. If you want to learn more about pre comps, feel free to watch the free course that I mentioned at the beginning of this course. You can find the link in the PDF file found in the main folder of the course you downloaded from me. Okay, let's select the pre comp and press control D to duplicate it. Now let's enter this pre comp and create a horizontal text. Let's long press the text tool and select the regular text this time. Now write typography, then press control and then the V key. Let's place the word up here. We can go to a line and ensure that the text is aligned to the center of the composition. Now let's duplicate this layer, select it, and press control D. Now drag it down here and change the text to animation. Now let's quickly change the names of our layers. I just want the names to start with capital letters. Next, let's select both of these layers and tag them with a different color so we can distinguish between the vertical and regular texts. Now let's switch back to the selection tool. And to save some time, we can copy the existing animator on this layer and paste it on one of our new layers. Let's open this layer. Select the animator and press control C to copy it. Now let's select this layer snap. I just realized that I didn't change the name of this layer. Let me fix this real quick. All right, now let's select this layer and press control V to paste the animator. Now if we press the U key, we'll see that the key frames are located here. This happened because when we passed the key frames, we were standing at this point in time with the time indicator. That's not a problem. Let's just select them and move them to the beginning of the animation. Now let's turn off these two layers and see what we have. These letters move sideways and not downwards. That's because we haven't changed anything in the animator yet. Let's open the animator and change the changing value in the position parameter. There is the range selector of this animator. Since we don't want the text to move sideways, we'll write zero here and go to the end of this animation. To set a new changing point for this animator, we want the final position of the text to be around here. Let's write 800. Now the text will move to the new position we set. Now let's do the same thing for the second text. Let's close this one, open this layer, and let's copy this animator from this layer with control C. Paste it onto this layer. This time let's reach the beginning of the animation. And then press control V. Now let's also change the value of the position parameter here. Let's reopen this layer to see the animator properties. And let's write zero here. Now we need to make this text move upwards. Let's set it to -800 Let's see how it looks. Let's turn off this layer to see it better. Now we see that the text moves from top to bottom. Great. Now let's move this layer here to create the same offset as before. Now we can delete these two layers. From here, we can turn on this layer. And there we created the same animation on horizontal text. Now let's change the size of the text to 150. Enlarge the second text as well. Let's see how it looks. Looks great. Now let's make this animation play in a loop, as we did earlier for the vertical text animation. Now let's go back to the main composition and drag the new pre comp here. We can turn off these layers for now. Now let's duplicate this pre comp, Move it here. Zoom in to ensure that the layer is placed exactly after the first one. Right click, Go to time and select time reverse layer. Let's see how it looks. Looks great. Now let's turn off these two layers and bring back the vertical text to learn what we should do if we want to change a few things in the animation or the design of the text. We will do that in the next part. See you there. 15. Let's render the final animation and orginize the project: Let's say we don't want the blur in this animation. For enter, this pre comp, let's turn off the background to see what we're doing. Now simply select both layers and search for blur in the search bar. Press Enter and change the value in this animator to zero. Let's do the same in the animator for this layer. As you can see, the blur disappears. Now we can close the search bar and check how that looks without a blur. Let's go back to the main composition and see how it looks. I think it looks great. Now let's turn off these layers and bring back the horizontal animation to learn how to deal with changes in the design or the animation. Let's say the position of the top text is too high and the position of the bottom text is too low. To change that, we need to go into this pre comp. Let's turn off the background here as well. Let's say we want this text to start its animation from here. Let's turn off this layer for now so it doesn't interfere. Let's see how it looks after we move the layer. As you can see, the text goes down too much. To change that, we need to modify the position property in the animator of this layer. Select the layer and type position in the search bar and press Enter. As you can see, there are two position properties here, one for the layers transforms and one for the animator. We will refer to the animators position property. The text goes down at the end of the animation because the value now stands at 800. Let's stay here with the time indicator and change the value according to the red markers. We can see where the text is positioned. We can set it to 250. Now let's see how it looks. Okay, it looks good. Now let's also change the position of the second layer and adjust the position parameter of the animator for this layer. First we need to move the layer here where the first text arrives. Let's turn off this layer for now and modify the position parameter of the animator. Currently, the text is positioned at the top. Let's select the layer, go to the search bar, and delete one letter. So after effects, we'll find the position property once again. Now let's change it to -250 Let's close the layer and the search bar, then turn on the second layer and see that everything works fine. We can set the preview to fit. To see it up close, it seems that everything is okay. Now let's go back to the main composition and see how it looks with the background. It looks excellent. And now let's render the animation. And turn off the vertical animation because this is the one I want to render. All right, it looks nice. Now press control M. Choose to render it in the H 0.264 format, which is a high quality MP four file. Now let's choose to save the file in the render folder we created. The name is good. Press save and click on the render button. Now let's wait until the render is finished to see the render. We can open the output mode and click on the link here. Let's open the video and see how it looks. If you also get an additional strange file alongside the P four file, simply delete it. Okay, let's open the correct file and see what we've created. It looks excellent. Now you can post this video on social media and showcase it on your portfolio website. If you enjoyed the course, I would greatly appreciate it if you rate this course based on how you feel and leave feedback so I know if you enjoyed the course or not. Okay, let's get back to our project now. Let's go to the project panel and organize the project. Let's create a new folder called pre comps. Make sure we don't select anything, and create another folder called Assets. Now put the color palette and the solids folder inside it. And in the precomps folder, put all the pre comps we created in this project, except for the main composition, which we can tag in blue. Now we can close all these pre comps. Next, let's save the project. Press control, and now you can close it. You can use this project for your future projects as well. Just remember when you make changes, update the animator parameters as we did just now. All right, I hope you enjoyed it, and I see you in the next lesson. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 16. Section 4: Paragraph Animation: In this lesson, we will create a super cool text animation as we continue learning about text animators and after effects in a more professional way. But this time we will do it with a text paragraph instead of a single text line as we have done so far, this lesson is divided into four parts which we will learn. First, we'll start by creating the first text paragraph. After that, we'll get into animating the text with a complex animator. We'll use some new parameters to make the text move in a really unique way. Not only that, we'll also learn how to work with more than one animator. Then we'll create a second paragraph. Next, we'll organize our panels so we can work more efficiently. Then we'll animate the second paragraph and create a cool transition between the first one. We'll finish this part by animating the third paragraph and combining it with a smooth transition between the rest of the paragraphs. In the final part, we'll make our animation look even better by adding some simple effects. And we'll learn how to create a pause in the animation so that the viewer has enough time to read what is written. Finally, we'll render the animation and organize the project before closing it. It's going to be awesome. Let's get started. 17. Learn how to work with text paragraph: So first, let's open after effects together. As always, we can close this window. And to make sure we all see the same panel layouts, let's click on Default. Now let's click on New Composition and set the settings for our first composition. Let's name it Text Animation four. We'll work in full HD format. Set the frame rate to 30 and the duration to 20 seconds. Finally, let's change the background to black. Click okay, Here and here. Now let's import the color palette to the project. Double click on the gray area in the project panel. Find the folder we created for this lesson and enter the Assets folder. Select the color palette and click on Import. Okay, now we can save the project and give it a name. Let's find the folder we created for the lesson. Then enter the AE folder and name the after effects file we're currently working on. We can select this project so that the name changes and replace the extension with four. Now click on Save. Now let's type our text For this, let's use the text I prepared for this lesson. Navigate to our Assets folder and open this file. This is the text we will use in this lesson. Great, let's copy the first paragraph. We'll select it and press control C. Now let's go back to our project. Select the text tool and create a text box like this. Now press control V to paste the text. Click once here, then press control to select all the text in this box. Let's change the font size to 30 and press Enter. Let's go to Paragraph, Align the text to the left. Now let's go back to character and change the text color to white. Then let's adjust the size of the box so that the text fits nicely inside something like this. To separate the title from the text, click once here, then press Enter. Now let's select all the text. Accept the title and change the font to Ezra regular. Next, click here to cancel the capital letters function. Now let's select the title, set the size to 40, and change the font style to Bell Story. Display light here as well. Let's uncheck the capital letters. All right, now we can go back to the selection tool and move on on. Second thought. Let's change the style of the title to display bold. Great. Adjust the box a bit like this. Now let's press here and press Enter to separate this part from the line. Make sure there is no hidden text below. I think that the text size should be smaller. Let's select it and change the size to 28. Now adjust the box according to the new size. One last thing, let's select the title and color it. All right. Now let's make a final adjustment to the text, because I don't like how this part of the paragraph looks. Click here to see the text box and drag it to the right. I'm doing all these adjustments so you can practice working with the text box more. This is better. Now let's select the selection tool and continue. After we've designed the paragraph and we're satisfied with its structure, let's center the anchor point of this layer using the shortcut. We learned control. Now let's press the apostrophe key to display the grid and place the layer here, because later we will add two additional paragraphs here and here. And in order to have some space for the two additional paragraphs, let's shrink this layer a bit. Press S to bring up the scale parameter and set it to 80. It's too small. Let's try 90. Yes, that's better. Let's close the layer and move it here. Okay, we can press the apostrophe key again to close the grid. Now let's make sure the paragraph is centered in the composition using the aligned tool. Click here before moving to the next part. Let's enlarge this panel so we can see all the properties we are going to add soon. Now we are ready to move on to the next part. See you there. 18. Advanced text paragraph animation: Welcome back. So first let's open the layer. We can close that, and now let's select the text and create the first animator. We'll choose position because this is one of the changes that the paragraph will make. Now let's zoom in and position the preview screen so we can see the text up close. Great. Now let's decide on the change point for this text. In our case we want the text, we'll enter the scene from the bottom. Let's write 100. After that, let's open the range selector and advanced. Let's enlarge this panel and zoom out a bit to see the movement we will create. Okay, so first we can already set the animator shape to ramp up, because we want the text to enter from the first letter to the last. If we change the offset, we can see that it's indeed happening. Now I want the text to enter word by word, not letter by letter. We change the offset. We can see that the text moves word by word. We can also change the text entry to line by line. It looks like this. In this case, I prefer word by word. Okay, now let's change the offset to -100 Now let's make sure we're at the beginning of the timeline and create the first key frame with a value of -100 Now let's go to the second number two and change the offset to 100. Next, let's adjust the animation behavior to make it smoother. Let's set the E is high to 20 and the is low to 80. Let's see how it looks. Now let's add a nice dissolving animation. For this, select the animator, go to Add property and choose Opacity. Now let's change the value of this property to zero, since we chose to ramp up. The animator knows that when the offset is at -100 the text should have a zero opacity. When the offset reaches 100, then the opacity of the text should return to the original opacity of this layer, which is 100% Okay, I think the text is starting to come from a very low point. To change that, we need to adjust the position parameter. Let's write 80, maybe 50. Let's see how it looks much better, but I think that the title is too small. Let's select it, increase it to 45, and make sure we didn't hide the rest of the text due to this action. I make all these changes to show you that the animation process is not set in stone. We always change and update things as we work until we achieve something we're happy with. Okay, we've finished creating the animator responsible for the text entry. Now I want the paragraph to move to the right after it's finished with the entry animation. This means that we need to make another change in the position property. In cases like this, we need to create a new animator because we already have a position parameter in our first animator which is responsible for moving the text from the bottom to the top. Since we need to create a new motion to the right, which is completely different from the position animation we currently have. We need to create a new animator with a different position value. Let's select the text again from here, and go to Animate to create a new position property. Before we adjust the new animator, let's press the apostrophe key to display the grid. This way we can see where to move the text. Now let's simply change the value of the position parameter for the new animator. Let's say we want the text to reach this point. Let's write 600. Now let's open the range selector and advanced. Let's change the animators shape to ramp up. If we change the offset, it seems that the text is moving from the last word to the first. That's not what we want this time. Let's change the animators shape to ramp down. This way the text will move from the first letter to the last. Let's change the offset to -100 and animate this animator. We want the movement to start only after the entire text appears. That is, only after the animation of the first animator finishes at the second number two, let's create the first key frame here with an offset of -100 And in the second number four, let's change the offset to 100. Now let's make the animation smoother. Let's keep the same data as in the first animator. Set these high to 20 and the low to 80. Let's see how it looks. Nice job. Now we're ready to add an additional parameter. This time we'll add a rotation to the second animator. For that, let's press Add, go to Property, and select Rotation. Now let's set a value for this parameter. For now, let's write 90 degrees and see how it looks. If we zoom in a bit on the text, we can see that currently each letter rotates individually. And it rotates from its bottom part. That's because the anchor point of each letter is positioned at the bottom. For text layers, there's an anchor point of the layer itself. And there is also an anchor point for the text to change this, let's open more options. First, let's change the anchor point behavior of this text layer to word. Now there is an anchor point for each word and not for each letter As before, we can also change it to line. This way there will be an anchor point for each line and not for each word. Now let's change the location of the anchor point. If we get a bit closer, we can see there's a small red X icon here, symbolizing the anchor point. We can change its location from here. Let's change it to -36 This way, the anchor point will be positioned in the middle of each row. Important not to move the anchor point too far from the text because that will complicate the animation later on. Let's write -35 here. Now let's return to the second animator and add a nice dissolving animation. We can do it by adding opacity to this animator, right? Zero here. Now, when we reach the last frame, the text will start to disappear while moving aside and rotating. Now let's make this animator a bit more interesting and add an additional parameter called tracking. To see what it does, let's go to the point in time where the text is already starting to move aside. Now let's change the value of this parameter. As you can see, it causes the letters of the text to separate from each other. Let's write ten here and see how it looks. It looks nice. Now let's set the preview back to fit and see all the animation we have created so far. As you can see, the text is moving too much to the right question. Which property in our animator do we need to change in order to fix this? To fix this, all we need to do is reduce the data in the position parameter of the second animator. Let's write 300 and see how it looks. Let's try 200. Still too much. Maybe 100. Let's see it one more time. I think 100 is better. If you want to make all this movement rise a little higher, you can do it either by moving the anchor point of this text paragraph or by adjusting it. You can play around with it and change the values here. Then move the time indicator to check the movement direction. All right. I will set it back to -35 as it was. All right, let's move on. Let's close all the parameters and continue creating the second text paragraph. To create another paragraph, we can duplicate the paragraph we already have in the scene. Because it already has all the animators set up. We just need to change the text and make some modifications to the animators. Let's select the layer and press control D. Now let's position the time indicator here so we can see the text. Then let's go to a line and center the new layer to the composition center. Next, let's open the text file again. But for now, don't do anything because I want to show you the issue you might encounter when switching between texts. Okay, let's say I'm copying the text now and pasting it into the new text box. Notice that after pasting the text, the text will appear in the same design as the title. This is not what I want, let's see how to do it correctly. Now, do it together with me. First, let's only copy the title and paste it in the titles Place On. Let's only copy the text and paste it in the texts Place On. Now all we need to do is adjust the text box and the spacing between the lines. Move a line here, reduce it slightly. Let's enlarge the box from the bottom. That's better. Now let's select the color palette and change the color of the title to orange. Additionally, we can change the color of the layer to differentiate between the texts. After we finish designing the new paragraph, let's move on to the next part and learn how to combine it with the animation of the first paragraph. In the meantime, let's turn off this layer. I'll see you in the next part. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 19. Nifty workflow tips: Welcome back. Before we dive into animating the second paragraph, I want to share a useful tip on organizing the software panel. Since we are now working with multiple animators and parameters, it's essential to keep things organized. First, we can move this section here, then we can place the preview screen here. Now let's grab our composition panel from here and drag it to this area. Since we don't need to use the project panel, we can move it to the side. This way we can see both the first text, second text. Let's set the preview to fit. Now we can open all the animators here and see all the parameters. In a more convenient way, if we want to see the keyframes on this layer, we can minimize this area like this. We can position the preview screen like that. We can also zoom in on the timeline to see the key frames up close. Okay. Now, because this paragraph doesn't need to make the entry animation like the first paragraph, we can turn off the first animator responsible for the entrance animation. We can close it for now. Now let's drag the key frames of the second animator to the beginning and change its data. The first data we'll change is the rotation direction. We'll write -90 here instead of 90. Now the text rotates in the opposite direction. In the next step, we need to change the data for the position parameter. We'll change it to -100 instead of 100. Now in order for the text to appear and not disappear as it does now, we need to change the animation mode to ramp up. The last thing we need to do is just change the data in the tracking parameter to minus ten instead of ten. That's how we created the reverse animation for this paragraph. Now we can completely delete the first animator because we don't need it at all. Okay, now let's make the paragraph move to the side in order to create the transition for the third paragraph. To do this, we can simply copy the second animator from the first paragraph because it's the animator that is responsible for the animation we need, let's select the second animator, press control C to copy it. We can close this layer now. Now let's select the text here and press control V, making sure we're on the second number two, so that when we paste the key frames, the first key frame will be positioned here. Now let's open this animator. This time we don't need to change anything for this animator, everything looks great. Now let's turn on the first layer and time between these two paragraphs. But before that, we can adjust the panels for a better workflow. First, let's enlarge this panel a bit. Now let's temporarily turn off the first layer. Also turn off the grid and see where the animation of the first paragraph ends. To see the key frames, we will select this layer and press you. Let's also select this layer and press you to display its key frames. Now let's place here the time indicator. Turn on this layer and try to find a nice point in time for this layer to enter the scene. Okay, I think we should start the second paragraph a bit later. Let's go to the second number three and move this layer here. Let's see it once again. Yes, I think it's excellent. Now let's move our preview screen here, show the grid and create the third and final paragraph. We can close and turn off this layer for now. Now let's duplicate this layer because its animation is very similar to the animation that should be in the third paragraph. Let's select it and press control D. And because we added a new layer, we will need to see a bit more of our timeline. For that, we can hide part of the data displayed here, for example, the stretch function. To hide it, we need to right click here, go to columns, and click on stretch. Now we don't see this part, and thanks to that, we can see a bit more of the time line. Let's also hide this section. Right click here, go to columns, and click on Parent and Link. Don't worry, we can bring back all these functions later. Okay, so now we have more space here and we're ready to continue with the project. Let's go back to the selection tool and move the new paragraph to the side. Let's move it while holding the shift key so that the layer moves in a straight axis. Now let's copy the title of the third text and paste it in place of the title here we can delete the extra space that was created here. Now let's copy the new text and paste it in place of the text in the new paragraph. Let's adjust the text box to get a nice paragraph. Excellent. Okay, now let's select the color palette through the project panel to see the colors. Let's enlarge this panel a bit. Now let's select the title and change the color to blue. We can shrink this panel back. Let's go back to the selection tool temporarily, turn off this layer, turn off the grid, and focus on the animation of the new paragraph. We can see that we don't need to change the entry animation for this paragraph. If we open the layer, we can see that the animator responsible for this animation is this one. And we don't have a problem with it. We do have a problem with the outro animation, which is controlled by this animator. We can temporarily turn off this animator because we don't want the paragraph to exit the frame like that. We want this paragraph to exit from above and disappear in the process. Similar to what happens in the entrance animation of the first paragraph just in reverse. Therefore, we can copy the animator responsible for this animation from this layer, which is this animator. Select it and press control. Now let's turn back on the final paragraph and place the preview screen so we can see it. Now let's paste it into this layer. Let's open it, select the text here, and press control V here. We see the animator here. We can delete this one. Now let's open this animator to time its key frames and adjust some data to create the desired animation. Since we know that we need to create the reverse animation of what is happening now, we can already change the animators shape to ramp down. Now after the text enters, it disappears from the frame, but it disappears and moves downward. To change its exit direction, we need to adjust the position parameter question. What should we write here to change the motion direction of this paragraph? We'll write -50 here. Now after the text enters, it immediately moves up and disappears. All right, now let's change the color of this layer to blue to differentiate between the layers. Now let's press you on this layer and on this layer to see their key frames. Let's also display the key frames of the first paragraph. Now let's time the animation between the second and the third paragraphs. Let's move this layer to the right place in time. We can turn on both of these layers now, move it to second number six and move the final paragraph here. Once we're done with the animation and we're satisfied with it, we can return the panels to the initial layout. Let's this panel down until we see this area in bright gray. And then release the click. We can enlarge the preview screen and set it back to fit. Now let's bring the time indicator to the beginning of the timeline, close all the layers, and check the animation before moving on. Everything looks great. Now we're ready to move on to the final part, where we will design our scene in a more interesting way. See you in the next part. 20. Make it readable: Welcome back. First, let's turn off the grid. Now let's select only the text and change the color to a bright color from the palette. Let's do this for all the texts in all the paragraphs. Now let's press control to save the project before we proceed Next, let's create a solid that will serve as our background press control Y. Let's color it in black. Let's bring the solid below all the layers. Now let's create a cool gradient for the background. Go to Effects and presets. If you can't see it, you can find this panel under window. Okay, let's write gradient here, and select gradient ramp. Let's drag this effect onto the solid. Now go back to the project panel and drag the palette into the composition so we can see the colors while working with the effect. Let's go back to effect controls. Select the solid to see the effect on it. Let's sample this color to create a fine gradient. Then we can delete this layer. Now select the effect. Now we can grab this small handle of the gradient and drag it to a suitable position. I'll put it back where it was, by the way. We can also move these handles from here. Let's place the darker part of the gradient here and the brighter part here. If we zoom in a bit, we can see that the gradient is not smooth. We can see some bands to fix this. We can write 30 and ramp scatter. That will soften it a bit. Okay, let's set the preview back to fit. And let's add a cool effect called glow to our paragraphs. Let's write glow here and drag the effect onto this layer. Set the glow threshold to 60. Now copy the effect and paste it onto the second paragraph. Let's paste it onto the third paragraph as well. Now let's go back to the project panel and learn how we can make the text paragraphs stay for a few seconds on the frame before moving on to the next paragraph. Because in the end you'll need to create a text animation in a way that people can read what's written. That's why the text needs to stay in the scene for a few seconds before it transitions to the next text disappears. Let's see how to do that. First of all, let's duplicate this composition through the project panel so that we can make changes to it without affecting the current composition. Let's select the composition and press control D. Now press Enter and change the name to text. Animation. Four, underscore long, let's enter the composition. As you can see, the text is changing very quickly and we can't read anything. First, to extend the duration of this composition so that we have enough time on the timeline, let's press control K Now let's set it to 40 seconds. And press Enter. Now let's zoom out on the timeline and extend all the layers we have here until the end of the composition like this. Now let's lock the background so that it doesn't interfere with us. Let's turn off these two layers so that we can focus on the first paragraph. Select it, and let's learn how to make it stay a bit longer in the scene. Okay, so first let's select it and press you to see its key frames. The next thing we need to do is decide from which point in time we want the second animator responsible for the outro animation to start. Let's go to the second number eight and let's move the key frames of the second animator here. Now, during this whole time, there will be no changes in the animation. That means the text will remain in place. Let's see how it looks there. The text appears stands for a few seconds and only at second number eight does the outro animation begin. Basically, we created a paragraph of exactly 6 seconds. Now let's do the same for the second paragraph. We'll select it, press you if the intro animation for this paragraph ends at second number five. Let's move to second number 11 to create the six second pause. Now let's move the key frames of the second animator here. Let's do the same for the last paragraph. We'll select it, press you now. Move to the second number 14. Now let's move the key frames of the second animator here. All right, now turn it on, close all the layers and see what we've got. As you can see, there are parts where we see all the paragraphs together, right? Because we made them each stop for 6 seconds. That's why we need to time them again between each other according to their new animation. Let's select all these layers. Press you enlarge this panel and time them. Let's select the second and the third text layers and try to find a nice point in time for them to enter the scene. We can move the two top layers to this point in time, second number nine because it's exactly in the middle of the outro animation of the first paragraph. Looks great. Now let's select the third paragraph and move it to second number 18. Let's see how it all looks together. The first paragraph enters. The scene stands for 6 seconds. Now it disappears. And immediately after that, the second paragraph enters the scene. It also stands for 6 seconds. Then it switches to the third paragraph. Okay, And save the project. And let's close all the layers. Go back to the short composition and render it first. Let's close the effects tab and exit this pre comp. And now we are ready to render this scene. We need to make sure that the work area of this composition ends where we want it to end. So that we don't render just a black screen. If the animation in this scene already ends here, we don't need all this area because we don't see anything here anymore. Let's see where the animation of this layer ends. It ends at this key frame. We'll stand here and press to shorten the work area to this point in time. Now let's press control to go to the render panel. We'll choose to render it in high quality, Her 0.2 64 format, which is an MP four file. And we'll choose to render it to our render folder. Let's make sure the name is good, then click on Save. And after that, click on Render. And wait a few moments. All right, the render is finished. Let's see what we've got. Looks nice. Now you can upload this video on social media, display it on your portfolio website, and of course, use this animation for your next project. If you're enjoying the course, I would greatly appreciate it if you could rate this course based on how you feel and leave feedback so that I know if you learn something new or not. Okay, now let's go back to the project and organize it before we close it. All right, so the first thing we need to do is to create a new folder in the project panel. We will call it Assets and drag the color palette into it, as well as the solids folder. Then create another folder called pre comps and drag the long pre comp into it. Finally, let's label the main composition in blue. Now let's press control to save the project before we close it. With that, we have finished the lesson. I hope you enjoy it, and I can't wait to see you in the next one. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 21. Section 5: Advanced Kynetic Typography Animation: Hi there. In this lesson we take a break from text animators and learn some new tricks for making awesome text animations. Plus, we'll be downloading a sweet plug in for after effects that'll make it easier to work with multiple layers. This lesson is divided into three parts, which we will learn in the first part, we'll talk about the purge feature which helps after effects run smoother and avoid any potential issues later on. Then we'll create the text and add it to the composition. Moving on to part two, we'll get into animating that text and even add some cool expressions to make it even more eye catching. Then we'll install that free plug in for after effects to take things to the next level. Finally, we'll make a loop for the animation, refine the look, and get it all ready to share with a high quality MP for file. And of course, we'll tidy up the project before we're done. It's gonna be awesome. Can't wait to get started just. 22. Let's design the scene: Let's lunch after effects. Together, we can close this window so that we all see the same panel arrangements. Let's click on Default. Now, go ahead and create our first composition. Let's name it Text Animation five. We will work in full HD format. Let's work with 24 frames per second. The duration of the composition will be 40 seconds. Now, change the background to black. Click Okay, here and there. Now let's import our color palette into the project. Double click on the gray area in the project panel, select the color palette, and click on Import. Now before we move on, I want to teach you about an action called purge. What is purge? When you work on a project, in after effects, it stores a bunch of data and info in its memory cache. Sometimes that cache can get all clogged up with old or unnecessary stuff, which can slow down the program and even cause errors or crashes. When that happens, you can use the Purge function to clear out the cache and free up some memory. It's super helpful when you're having performance issues or running into errors, just clear out that cache and you'll see a big improvement in how the program runs. So let's purge the project together. Now click on Edit, go to Purge, and click on All Memory and Disk cache. Great, so now we can see how much chunk we have. It may be a different number for you anyway. Let's hit okay, and wait a few seconds Al. Right now we can save the project and give it a name. Let's locate the folder we created for the lesson. Enter the AE folder and name the file which we are currently working on. You can select this project to get this name and change the extension to five. Finally, hit Save. Now let's start to design the scene. First, let's write the text. For this, we'll select the text tool and type the word Learn. Now select all the text and change the Fanta Montserrat. Set the style to black and adjust the size to 150. Now click on the option for capital letters. Now let's change the color of the text to black. Next, click on the stroke color option and set it to white. Here we can adjust the line thickness. Let's set it to one. Now don't forget to go to paragraph tab and align the text to the center. Also, let's go back to character and ensure the stroke is set to overfill. Okay, now let's switch back to the selection tool. Press the apostrophe key to display the grid. Now let's center the anchor point of this layer, press control at home to achieve that. Now to center the layer in the composition without using the aligned tool, let's use a new shortcut press control home. Let's duplicate this layer. Press control D, then move it downwards and change the word to motion to exit the text editing mode. Press control Enter. Now let's duplicate this layer again. Select the selection tool, move it downwards, and change the word to design. Now to maintain the same word order as in the scene, let's move the motion layer here and the design layer here. Now let's switch back to the selection tool and bring all the layers up so that the middle word is in the center of the composition. Let's use the Align Tool to create equal spacing between all the layers. Make sure we have selection chosen here. Let's click here. Finally, I'll use the down arrow on the keyboard to move all the layers down a bit. Great, now we are ready to move on to the next part and start to animate the scene. See you there. 23. Installing a handy free script: Welcome back. The first thing we need to do is to move these layers left and right. Question, which property should we animate to do that? To achieve this, we will use the position property, press P to display it on all layers. Now in second number zero, let's decide that the layers will stay here. Let's move them a bit more to the left. Using the left arrow on the keyboard, we will create a key frame. Now let's move to second number two and move the layers to the other side while holding down the shift key. Now let's move to second number three and return the layers to their initial position. For this, we can duplicate the first key frames. But if we select all of them, press control C to copy them, and then press control V to paste them. Note that we pasted all the layers instead of just the key frames. This happens when we select key frames from different layers. To prevent this from happening, we need to duplicate each key frame for each layer individually. Let's select this keyframe, Press control C, and now press control V. Let's do the same for the next two layers. Let's see how it looks. Okay, moving on, let's select all the key frames and convert them to AsE's using the nine key. Now the motion will be smoother. Now we need this movement to continue until the end of the composition. To do this, we can use the expression that we used in the second lesson when we created the loop for the pre comp. Because the first key frames and the last key frames on these layers are the same, we can do the same here. For this, we will hover over the stopwatch icon of this parameter. Hold down the alt key, and click on the stopwatch once. Now let's click on the small arrow, go to Property, and select this expression. Click here to finish the operation. And let's do the same for the next two layers. But instead of repeating all these steps, we can simply right click on this parameter and choose copy expression only. Now let's select both layers and press control V to paste the copied expression. There you have it. All the layers continue to repeat the same movement even after the last keyframe hit the Spacebar. To see that all works fine, looks nice. Now let's create a nice offset in the animation for this place, the time indicator at frame number six. Now let's move closer in the time line and shift the key frames of these two layers to frame number six. Now let's reach frame number 12. Select the key frames of this layer and move them here. That's how we've created a cool offset for the animation. That way we get a much more interesting motion in the scene. Looks great. Now let's select all the layers and nest them into one pre comp. Let's use the shortcut this time. Press control shift C. Now let's change the name to text comp one, Make sure both are selected and press. Okay, great. So now if we enter this pre comp, we will see all three of our text layers in the future. Once we create the effect, we can go in here and change the words if we want. All right, now let's go back to the main composition and start creating the effect. First, let's duplicate this pre comp using control D. Now let's select the bottom layer, press S and create an expression for this layer. To do this, we'll hover the mouse over the stopwatch of this parameter. Hold down the alt key and click the stopwatch once. Now, locate the main folder for the course you created. Enter the Assets folder and open the file named expression for less than five. Now let's select and copy everything written here. Next, let's go back to our project. Click here and paste the copied expression. Click here to finish the action. Note that now this layer has scaled. Let's turn off the grid. All right, so with the help of this expression, we made it so that every time we copy this layer, it'll automatically go behind the last one and get 20% bigger. Pretty cool. No extra work needed. Let's select this pre comp and press control D. Now we have created a new pre comp that is 20% larger than the previous pre comp. This layer is positioned behind the layer before it. Let's duplicate this pre comp until we reach a total of 20 layers. Let's enlarge this panel to see all the layers and continue duplicating the second pre comp. Now let's set the preview to fit. Continue working on the scene. Now let's select the first layer, go to effects and presets, and search for an effect called invert. Drag this effect onto the first precomp. Now let's press to bring up the scale parameter of this layer and enlarge it a bit to match the size of the precomps behind it. I think 120 should be fine. Let's close the layer and move on. Now if you come closer to see the precomps up close, you'll notice that they are not of such good quality, especially the ones that are behind. This is because they are scaled much larger than the ones before them. To improve the quality of the precomps, we can activate the collapse function located here. If you don't see this icon, you can click here. Let's select all the layers and apply the collapse function to each of them. There it is, the quality has significantly improved. Now let's set the preview screen to fit and see how the entire scene looks. Great. Now we need to create a cool wavy look movement to this animation. To achieve that, we need to create an offset for all our pre comps in the composition. We can do this manually, of course, but it would take a lot of time. Additionally, if we realize that the offset is not good, it would be very difficult to change it. That's why we need to use the juice plug in, which allows us to arrange the layers quickly and easily. First, I'll demonstrate how it works, and then we will download and install the plug in together. All right, I'll open the plug in and drag it here. I'll shrink this panel a bit. Now all I need to do is select all the layers I want to move, choose the direction of the offset, and set the distance between each layer. All I have to do now is click on Stagger And that's it. I got an offset from the first layer to the last. I press control Z and show you what would happen if I choose to arrange the layers in this way. They would be sorted from last to first. All right, I'll bring everything back to normal. Let's install the plug in together. I'll show you how to do it both on Mac and Windows, although it's pretty much the same process for both. But before that, press control to save the project, in case you didn't match the software preferences as we did in the first lesson, please go to Preferences, Scripts and Expressions, and make sure to check this box. Otherwise the plug in might not work properly. All right, now it's best to exit the project before installing the plug in. You will not see the script after installation in after effects. While after effects is open after the script installation, you will have to reopen the project anyway. I suggest closing the project now and after the installation, we will open it back. But before closing the project, don't forget to save it. All right, first I show it for Mac users. First, go to the Ags website. Find the link in the PDF file located in the main folder of the course you downloaded from me. Now you need to register or log into the website. Next, go to Free Plugins and click on Download from Mac. Enter your email here, check the box and download. Now you can check your mailbox or just click here. Then choose where you want to save the file and click Save. Now open the folder and extract the zip file. After that, you can delete the zip file. Great. Now open the installer, Click Continue, enter your password if needed, and click Installed. After the installation, you can delete the installer. Great, Now we can minimize all the open folders and lunch after effects. Go to Window and open the age pack manager. Now click here on the side to exit the guides. The most important thing is to log into your account From here, cool. You can go back to After Effects and close this panel and open the Ages shifter. Now I want to show the installation process for Windows users. It's pretty much the same, so I won't talk and just show the process users you can close after effects for now. Soon we will open our project together. In the meantime, Windows users, you can follow along with me and download the plug in. All right, after we have installed the plug in, let's navigate to the AE folder and open our project. Now let's open the plug in. So go to Window and click on AEG shifter. You can attach this panel to the preview panel. Just drag it from this area and attach it to the blue section here. You can scale it down a bit. Now let's select all the layers. Choose this arrangement, set the offset to one frame and click on Stagger. But before moving on, let's place this panel here and close it for now. Because we have created an offset for the layers, the animation now looks much more interesting. It looks excellent. Now let's move on to the final part and create a loop for this animation. So see you there. 24. Improve the animation and render the final version: To create a perfect loop, we need to find an identical frame along the animation. One at the beginning and one at the end. Let's say that the beginning frame of the animation will be at second number two. Now we can capture this frame so we can compare it with the second frame. We will choose to end the animation. We can also select all the layers and at a marker, we can know that this will be the point where the animation begins. Now let's move a few seconds forward and try to find the point in time where the text returns to the same point we captured. To see better what we are doing, we can enlarge the preview panel and set the preview to fit. Okay, let's check if we can close the loop yet. Nope, not yet. Let's give it another shot. Still not good. We're getting there, but not quite there yet. Let's try to check it in second number six. Yes, that is the right point in time. Great. Now let's enlarge this panel, select all the layers again, and create a marker at this point as well. Now let's adjust the work area to the markers we set to shorten the work area from its end press. Now let's move toward the first markers while holding down the shift key. Now let's shorten the work area from its beginning using the B key. Since we don't need this whole section anymore, let's press control K to access the composition settings and shorten its length from 40 seconds to 10 seconds. Before moving any further, it's a good time to press control and save the project. Ok. Now let's enlarge the preview screen and hit the Spacebar to see the animation. You can render this animation as it is now, or you can change the animation a bit with me. If this is the case, you can enter the pre comp of the text together with me and change the motion of this text by changing some parameters in the keyframes to display all the key frames of all the layers. Let's make sure we don't select any layer and press the Ukey. Now let's select all the key frames here. Hover over one of them. Hold the out key and click on it twice. This way we'll reach the keyframe velocity panel. We haven't talked about it in a while. Anyway, here we can change the animation behavior of the texts by entering different values. Let's set it to 85 x 85 press, okay, and see how it looks. If we go to the graph editor, we can see that the curve of these key frames looks like this now. Meaning the text will start moving slowly, gain high acceleration, and then slow down again towards the end. Okay, let's exit the graph editor and return to the main composition to see how it affects the effect we created. Let the software render the scene a bit. I like it this way. I'll keep this animation and move on. Now if we zoom out a bit, we can see a few more layers behind which we don't see in the scene because they are large and extend beyond the boundaries of the scene. Let's see how we can reduce the size of this entire scene without touching the layers. For this right click here, go to New and select adjustment layer. What is the adjustment layer? The adjustment layer is a special layer in after effects that allows you to apply effects and adjustments to multiple layers simultaneously. Instead of applying the same effect to each individual layer, you can add an adjustment layer and apply an effect to it. The effect will then be applied to all layers below it in the layer stack. The benefit of using an adjustment layer is that it allows you to make global changes to your composition quickly and easily. We created an empty, an invisible layer that has nothing on it. We will use this layer to create a filter that will affect the scene. To do this, let's go to effects and presets and search for an effect called transform. Let's drag the effect onto the adjustment layer and change the name of this layer to transform, so that we know which effect is applied to it. Okay, now let's set the preview screen to fit and change some parameters in this effect. As you can see, there is a parameter here called scale because all these layers are below the adjustment layer. They will all be affected by the changes we make to it. Okay, let's set it to 90 and see how the scene looks. I think we can reduce it a bit more. Let's try 80. Maybe 60, perhaps 50. No, 50 is too much. Pay attention here. I don't like it, so I'll change it back to 60. Let's see how that looks. Let's allow after effects to render the scene for a few seconds. All right, I think it looks great. Now let's color the text in the colors from our color palette. Go to the project panel and select the color palette from here to see the colors. Now let's go back to the text composition. Then open the character tab. And now select all the layers. And change the text color to the dark color from the palette. For some reason, it's not capturing the correct color for me. I'll deal with it in a moment. In the meantime, let's click here to change the color of the line to the bright color from the palette. Okay, once again, for some reason I can't capture the colors. I'll just drag the palette here and pick the colors from there. That's better. Now, I'll delete the palette and go back to the main composition. As you know, we don't actually have a background in the scene. The black color we see here in the background is the default background color of the previous screen, and it's not a real background. To create a real background, we need to create a new solid. Let's select this panel and press control. Now let's change the color. I see it's still causing me, I'll just pick the color from here. Let me go in here to check if it's the right color. Now let's press okay, let's move this layer below all the other layers. Now pay attention that the solid is very small. This happens because the solid is also influenced by the transform effect on the adjustment layer. It's not a problem at all. Let's select the solid press and enlarge this layer until it fits the Scene 180 is great. We can activate the collapse function for the solid as well. Okay, let's close the layer. Go to the project panel, press control S to save the project and move on to render the animation. I want to remind you that after effects will render only what is within the boundaries of the work area. Because we have shortened the work area perfectly to create a loop, we have no problem with it. But if you still don't want to see all that unnecessary area, you can simply write, Click on the work area and choose Trim Comp to work area. Now let's press control. And to access the render panel, we will choose to render it in the high quality H 0.264 format, which is a high quality MP four. We will choose to render it to our render folder. Let's make sure the name is good. Click on Save and then click on Render. Let's wait a few moments. Okay, now let's see what we got. It looks great. As always, you can upload this video to your social media channels or display it on your portfolio website and of course, use this animation for your next projects. If you're enjoying the course, I would greatly appreciate it if you could rate this course based on your experience and leave feedback so I know if you learn something interesting or not. Okay, now let's get back to the project and organize it. Before we close it, let's create a folder called Pre comps. Make sure we don't select anything, and create another folder named Assets. Drag the color palette and the solids folder into it and into the precomps folder. Let's drag the precomp we created, label the main composition in blue and press control S to save the project. Before we close it, great, I hope you enjoyed it. We'll meet again in the next lesson. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 25. Section 6: Isometric Camera Text Animation: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to dive into making some cool three D text animations To make things even easier, We'll be installing a free script for after effects. That's super handy for working with anchor points. This lesson is divided into three parts. First things first, we will design and animate the first object in the scene. Then we'll convert everything into three D and learn how to navigate in the three dimensional space. Next, we'll install a free script to help us arrange everything perfectly. Once we've got that under control, we'll complete designing the scene using the script. After that, we'll learn how to create an isometric camera and animate the scene using one layer only. Finally, we'll add some more designs to the scene and improve the overall look and the animation. Then we'll export the whole thing as a fancy NP four file ready to share on social media and your portfolio. And then we'll tidy up the project. Before we're done, it's going to be awesome. So let's get started. 26. Setting up the scene: Let's open the after effects software. We can close this window and so that we all see the same panel arrangements. Let's click on Default. Now let's create our first composition. We will name it text animation six. Now let's go to Three D Renderer and make sure we select three D Classic. Okay, now let's go back to basics and set the size to full HD. The frame rate to 24, the duration to 10 seconds, and the background to black. Now let's import the color palette into the project. Double click on the gray area in the project panel. Find the folder you created for the lesson and enter the Assets folder. Select the color palette and click on Import. Okay, now we can save the project and give it a name. Let's find the folder we created for the lesson. Enter the folder. Select this project to copy the name, change it to six, and click on Save. Let's set the preview screen to fit and start to create the scene. First, let's create the text. Select the text tool and type step by step. Now double click on the text to select it all. Now go to Paragraph and align the text to the center. Make sure the writing direction is from left to right. Now go to Character and change the font to one of the start fonts called Bells Story. Now change the style to display bold. Let's change the font size to 160. Now let's go to Align. And align the text to the center of the composition. Click here and here. Now in order to center the anchor point of the layer, press control Alt Home. Now to create the first part of the stairs, we need to nest this text into a pre comp so we can adjust its size and design it as we want. Select the layer and press control shift C, the name is already good. Just click on. Okay, let's enter the pre comp. Now let's resize this composition to the size of the text. For this, we need to access the composition settings. Press control K. Now let's change the width until we get the size we want. I think 1,200 is good enough. Now let's adjust the height to see the changes. Don't forget to select Preview. I think 200 will be good. Once we're done with that, let's click Okay. Now we need to create a background. Let's select the color palette so that we can see the colors. Let's click here and press control to create the solid. Let's color the solid and pink press. Okay, and bring this layer down. Select the text and change its color to a bright color from the palette. Now let's make the text constantly move upwards. We can do this with an effect called motion tile. Let's go to effects and presets. If you don't see this panel, you can find it in window. Okay, let's tight motion here. Then we can drag this effect onto our text. Now we can see the effect in effect controls for those who can't see this panel. You can find it under window. Okay, to get the text moving, we got to animate this parameter. First things first, let's make sure we're starting at the beginning of the composition and get that first keyframe set up with the text in its original spot. Now to see the key frame we created, just hit the UK. Then move to the end of the composition and slide that parameter in the direction we wanted to go. 900 looks good. What's important here is to find a point where the text is positioned in the same spot as in the first keyframe. This way we'll create a perfect loop To be sure we can press the apostrophe key to bring up the grid and see how the text is positioned relative to it. For example, I see that this part of the letter is located here. Now let's go to the last key frame and confirm that the same part is exactly in the same place. Excellent, now let's see how it looks. Our main focus needs to be on the part when the animation ends and starts again. This part needs to be clean without cuts or jumps in some frames. Perfect the animation starts again without problems, which means that we created a perfect loop. With that, we have finished creating the first part of the stairs. We will have eventually. Now let's create the rest parts of the stairs. We can close the layer and return to the main composition. Here we can see the pre comp which is the first part of the stairs. Before moving to the next part, let's go back to the project panel, close the effects, and proceed to the next part, where we start building the rest of the parts of the stairs. 27. Work in 3D space: All right, so first let's tag this layer in red. It will help us in the near future to navigate and organize the other parts of the stairs we are going to create soon. All right, now we need to duplicate this layer. So let's press control D. Now we need to place it exactly above the first layer to do this most accurately. It's not enough to just hold the shift key because we need them to snuggle up really close together. For this, we can activate snapping. If you don't see it, make sure you're working with the selection tool. Now let's click here and also enable these two functions. As soon as we drag this layer away, it will easily snap to the layer below it. We need to grab the layer from its lower part. That way we help after effects understand which part we want to bring closer and connect. Okay, now let's duplicate this pre comp again and drag the duplicate downwards. We'll drag it until both layers are connected to each other like this. Now let's select both of our duplicates and tag them with a different color than the middle part of the stairs. Let's just bring this layer down here so that we have the same order as in the scene. Meaning the middle part is in the center, the upper part is above, and the lower part is down here. Okay, now let's duplicate the upper part and move it upwards until it precisely aligns with the part below it. Now let's duplicate the lower part and bring it down until it aligns with the part above it. Now in order to turn all these parts into the stairs, we need to convert these layers into three D layers. We can do this by clicking on the icon located here. If you don't see this icon, you can click here. Let's convert all the layers into three D layers. Now let's change the view to see the scene from a slightly different angle. An angle that is more convenient for us to view the scene in the three D space. To do this, let's change the view from here. For those who don't see this area, try dragging the panel here until you see it. Okay, let's change our view to custom view one. Now we can see the scene from a slightly different angle. Now let's zoom in a bit and select this layer. And press the R key to display the rotation parameter. As you can see, after converting the layer into a three D layer, we have additional rotation axis. Rotation in the Z axis, which we had before when the layer was two D, we have rotation in the Y axis and the X axis. To create the stairs, we will change the rotation of this axis. For convenience, let's select this part of the stairs, press and lower the opacity to 50. This way we have marked the central part of the stairs. It's easier this way to understand what we are doing. Now let's close the layer and continue creating the stairs. But as you can see, when I rotate this part, it doesn't actually create the shape of the stairs. This happens because this layer is rotating from its center. This means we need to move the anchor point of this layer to its upper part. We can do this manually using the Anchor Point tool, or we can use a free and super handy free script called Reposition Anchor Point. First I will show you how it works and then we will download and install it together. Here I can choose which corner to place the anchor point. This represents this corner, that represents that corner, and so on. In my case, I need this corner. Therefore I make sure I select the correct layer. Then I select the position where I want to move the anchor point. And then I press reposition to perform the action. There you go, the anchor point, jump to the chosen location. Now when I rotate this part, it will rotate correctly. Okay, so now let's install the script together. I'll show you how to do it both on Mac and Windows. I will close it for now. Let's press control as to save the project. And let's close it. You will not see the script after installation and after effects. While after effects is open, after the script installation, you will have to reopen the project anyway. So I suggest closing the project now and after the installation, we will open it back. But before closing the project, don't forget to save it. All right, let's install the script. First, go to AE Scripts website. Find the link in the PDF file located in the main folder of the course you downloaded from me. Or just type scripts on Google and enter this website. Now you need to register to the site. I already have a user, so I'll log in, then search the script, click on it, and enter your price. You can write zero or leave a tip to the creators of the script. After that, click on Add to cart, then go to the shopping basket up here. In the shopping basket, You can see the product. Click on Proceed to Checkpoint. You can press Continue until you reach the third part, where you click on Place Order. Now go to my Download and license and download the script. Choose a convenient folder for you and extract the winner or zip file. After downloading after the extraction, you can delete the winner or the zip file. Now go into the folder until you see the JX file. You need to copy the JX file and paste it into the after effects folder. First of all, you need to know where your software is installed for Windows users. You can find it in the C Drive program files. Adobe After Effects for Mac users. Open Finder, go to Applications, Adobe After Effects. In my case, I installed all my Adobe programs on my D driver. That's why I'm not going to the C driver. All right, and now enter the support files, Then scroll down a bit and enter scripts. Go to scripts I panels and paste the JSX file Here, we can close that. Now after installing the script, let's go back to the folder we created for the course and to the AE folder and open our project. Now let's go to Window, scroll down and select Reposition Anchor Point. We can drag the script panel into the workflow area. Now let's select this part of the stairs and select the position where you want the anchor point to move. Then click on Reposition to perform the action. Now let's select this layer and choose to position the anchor point in this corner. Let's check if it worked. Open the rotation parameter for this layer and rotate it on the x axis -90 degrees it worked, but as you can see, the layer above it doesn't move with it. It would have been very helpful if they moved together. To do this, we can link this layer to this layer using the parent and link feature. Now when we rotate this layer, the layer above it will move together with it. Let's do the same thing here. Link this layer to this layer. Now when we rotate this part, the part below it will move together with it. Okay, let's rotate this part -90 degrees. Let's also rotate this part -90 degrees. Now, in order for this part to rotate correctly, let's position its anchor point in the correct corner. Because currently, if we rotate it, it will rotate from its center question. Which corner do we need to move the anchor point of this specific layer to? We will position the anchor point of this layer in the bottom corner. Now when we rotate this layer on the X axis, it will rotate as we need it to. This time we'll write 90 degrees. Now let's select this layer. Press are to open the rotation perimeter. And it is also rotating from its center, which is not what we want. Which means we need to move its anchor point to the top corner. Let's do it now. Change the rotation on the x axis to 90 degrees. Now let's close all the panels. Next, we need to ensure that all parts of the stairs rotate together. When we rotate the middle part, this will make it easier for us to move the stairs later on. To achieve this, we need to link all parts of the stairs to the middle part. However, since this part is already linked to this one, we need to link just this part. Now we have created a chain link. Meaning this part is linked to that one and that part is linked to the main part. This means that if I now rotate the main part, all the parts above it will rotate together with it. Now let's do the same for the bottom part of the stairs. We can see that this layer is already linked to this layer. Therefore we will only link this layer to the main part. Now if we rotate this part, all the parts of the stairs will move with it. Great. Now let's press control S to save the project, set the preview screen to fit, and continue creating the rest parts of the stairs from above and below. For this, let's select these two parts and duplicate them using control D. For the new duplicates to stand side by side here in the layer panel, we will drag them upwards like this. Excellent, now we need to move these two parts to this area. It's important to remember that because this part is linked to this part, we can only move this part and the part above it will move with it. Let's move this part along its y axis like this. Now, to position these two components precisely, we can use the left view. This is how our scene looks from the side. Here we see all our layers from the side, and here are the new layers. Let's move it forward a bit and try to place it on the top of the stairs. You can get a bit closer. I press here to unselect the layer, We can see that it's not aligned with the stairs. Let's move it upward a bit more. Let's get a bit closer and align this part properly. That's better. Now let's stay in this view and duplicate these two lower layers. Let's select them, Press Control D, and bring them down in the layer panel. Now we can see that this layer is linked to this layer. We will only move this layer and the second layer will move with it. Move these parts here. Now let's bring them down, let's get a bit closer and place them next to the rest of the stairs. That's good enough. Now let's go back to custom view and see how it looks. Let's rotate this layer to see that all the parts are linked properly. Well done. Now let's go back to the left view and add more stairs to the scene. For this, let's select these two layers, Press control D, and move them up in the layer panel. Now let's move on this layer, and the second layer will move with it. Let's move these parts here, let's get a bit closer, and place them next to the rest of the stairs. That's good enough. Let's do this one more time for the bottom part, let's select these two layers, Press control D and bring them down in the layer panel. Now let's get a bit closer and move on this layer. And the second layer will move with it. Move these parts here, get a bit closer, and place them next to the rest of the stairs. Looks good. Now let's set the preview back to fit. Press control S to save the project and go back to custom view one to see that everything looks correct. Okay, everything looks great. And now we can return to active camera, which is the original angle of our scene. And before moving to the next part, let's select this layer, press T and set the opacity to 100% Now let's learn how to create the isometric camera. Let's see how to do it. See you in the next part. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 28. Create an isometric camera and animate the scene with one layer: To create an isometric camera, first we need to add a new camera to the scene. To do this, right click here. Go to New and select Camera In the camera type. Choose two node camera and select 50 millimeters. Then hit okay. In the next step, we will create a new null object. Right click one more time, go to New and choose the null object. Now convert it into a three Dlayer so that it can interact with the camera. Then link the camera to the null. Now let's open the camera and access the camera options from here in the zoom section. Enter 10,000 Now close camera options and open the transform properties. Now change the position to -10,000 Let's close the layer. Now let's select the null and press R to open the rotation parameter. Change the orientation to 45 here, 35.30 Currently, the stairs are not visible as intended. They appear from behind to see them from the front. Let's change the value to -45 And there you have it. Let's close the null, and we can see our scene from a cool isometric camera angle. Next, let's create an illusion of shadow for the stairs. We can achieve this using effect called levels. Drag the effect onto the main layer, Change the output white parameter to 180. Now let's copy the effect from this layer and paste it onto all the upright parts of the stairs. Select the effect and press control C. Then select the vertical part of the stairs, and paste the effect on them using control V. Let's paste it on the rest of the vertical parts. Excellent, Now press control S to save the project. Let's move on to the next step to animate the scene. To animate this scene, we can set key frames for the null object. Select it, and press R. By rotating it, we can observe changes in the camera angle. This is because the camera is linked to this null. In other words, every time we rotate the null, we are essentially rotating the camera, creating new angles within the scene. In our case, we will create key frames for both the X and Y axis. Let's decide that at second number two, the current camera angle will be as it is right now. Let's create key frames for both the X and Y axis. Now let's move to the beginning of the time line and create an interesting angle for the scene. -45 on the y axis looks good. Next let's set the x axis to 35. Perfect, That looks very nice. Moving on to the force second, we want to return the camera angle to its initial position. To achieve that, let's copy the first two key frames using control C and paste them at the current time indicator place using control V. Lastly, let's shorten the work area to the position of the time indicator. What is the shortcut to shorten the workflow area from the end of the timeline, the position of the time indicator. To do this, let's press the N key. All right, now let's see how everything looks. It looks good. For now, we will revisit the camera movement later to create a more interesting motion. For now, let's continue designing the scene. For example, let's see what needs to be done. If we want to add additional text layers to this area, we can close the null layer. Now let's grab the text tool and write some text. Now let's select the text and change the font to era Bolt. Next we'll go to the paragraph settings and align the text in the center. Now let's switch back to the selection tool and center the anchor point of this layer. Use the shortcut control Alt home to do this. Then let's go back to the character settings. If you want, you can click here to make all the letters uppercase. However, I prefer not to do that. Okay, now let's position this text here on the side. First, we need to convert this layer to a three D layer so that the camera can refer to it in the scene. Then press to open up the position parameter. And move this layer within the scene. Bring it down here and move it closer to this area. You can also move it from the handles on the layer. Now press to bring up the rotation parameter and rotate this layer around the y axis by 90 degrees. Let's move it a bit here and see how it looks with the camera animation. To ensure that we have placed the text right next to the stairs, we can view the scene from the front view. Let's select the text, Zoom in a bit and move it right near the line of the stairs. That looks good enough. Now let's go back to the active camera, which is the camera we have in the scene and continue designing the scene. We can move this text layer upwards so we can add more text to the scene. Moving the layers in the three D space can help you memorize the different axis directions. Now let's duplicate this layer, bring it down, and place it next to this corner. Let's change the word to motion. Press control Enter to exit the text editing mode. And to be able to move the layer, press V to switch back to the selection tool, let's position the layer next to this corner. Let's move this layer a bit to the left. Next, let's duplicate this layer and bring it down and change the word to design. Now go back to the selection tool and place the layer next to this corner. Now let's select all these layers, press S to open up the scale parameter. Now scale them up a bit. Let's say 115% That should be enough. Now let's move these layers slightly to the side like this. Set the preview screen to fit, and see how it looks with the camera movement. As you can see, we are unable to see a part of this word. Let's close all the layers and adjust the camera movement a bit so that we can see the entire word. To do this, we'll select the null and add a position animation to its existing rotation. Animation press to see the position parameter. At this point in time, I want the camera to be as it is right now. Therefore, I will create a key frame with the current value. Now let's move to the second number two, which is when the camera rotates. And let's change the value of the position parameter until we reach a nice angle. Make sure you don't reach the end of the stairs when you change the value. Okay, that looks good. Now let's move to the for a second, which is the end of our animation. And bring the camera's position to its initial state. To do this, let's copy the first key frame and paste it here. Now let's improve the animation of the camera movements by converting all the key frames to as. To see all the key frames on this layer, press you once and then once again. This way we can see all the key frames. Now to convert all the key frames to Z's, select all the key frames and press nine. Let's see how it looks now. Okay, that looks a bit better. Now let's improve it even more. Select only the key frames for the position parameter. Now hold down the Alt key and click on one of the key frames twice. Change the key frame velocity to 90 by 90. Hit Enter, and let's see it one more time. It's getting more interesting. All right, now let's select the key frames for the rotation axis X. Hold down the Alt key and click on one of the key frames twice here as well. Let's change the key frame velocity to 90 by 90. Let's see how it looks. I think the motion looks more interesting that way. Next let's select the key frames for the rotation axis Y. Hold down the alt key and click on one of the key frames twice. But here let's change the key frame velocity to 70 by 70. And let's see how it looks. I think it looks great. Now let's create the wall for our stairs. However, we don't need to use additional three D layers for this. We can simply create the illusion of a wall. Let's see how to do it first. Let's create a new solid using the shortcut control. Why change the color to the dark pink color that we have here? Let's darken it a bit more, something like this. Now let's press okay, here and here. Next, let's place this layer below all the layers and move the solid to the right place for this. Let's stop at this point in time where we see the stairs in front. Now move the solid to the center of the composition. We can press the apostrophe key to display the grid to see the center of the composition. Now let's move the solid here, while holding down the shift key. Let's see how that looks. Move forward in time to the point where we can see the stairs from a side view. We need to check if we've moved the solid to the right place. It seems like we have moved it too much. Let's move the solid slightly to the right. Looks great. Now let's improve the overall look by creating an illusion that the wall disappears when we see the stairs in front and reappears when we see the stairs from the side. Let's go to the point in time where we can see the stairs from the side. Now select the solid representing the wall and press to access the opacity parameter. Let's set a key frame for the opacity at this point in time with a value of 100% Now let's go to the beginning of the animation and change the opacity value to zero. At the end of the animation, we'll set the opacity value back to zero. Then let's convert these keyframes to ZE's using the short cut F nine. Now by holding down the alt key and double clicking on one of the key frames, we can adjust the velocity. In this case, we'll set the velocity to 90 by 90, matching the x axis rotation velocity of the null object. Press Enter, and let's see the animation to ensure it looks good. I love it. Now let's create a background to the scene. Go to the project panel and select the palette. Now press control, why to create a new solid and pick this color. Then place this layer below all the layers. I see that for some reason I didn't pick the right color. I bring the color palette to the composition. Now to change the color, I'll select the solid and press control shift Y. I'll pick the color once again and remove the palette from the scam. Now I want to ensure that the colors I picked earlier for the background, for the parts of the stairs, were correct. I'll select the solid press control, shift Y, and quickly change the color to the right one. You don't have to do that if you get the colors you want. All right, now let's select the three text layers and change their color to yellow. Once done, the animation is ready for rendering. But before we render the animation, let's hit the apostrophe key to hide the grid. Now let's review it once again to ensure everything is good. Great, everything looks fine. And we're ready to render the scene. Press control to access the render que. Choose the H 0.264 format and select our render folder as the output destination. Verify that the name is good. Then click Save and Render. Let's wait a few moments for the rendering process to complete. Okay, now let's see the final result. The animation looks excellent. As always, you can share this animation on your favorite social media platforms. Post it on your portfolio website or use it in your next projects. Now let's go back to the project and organize it. Before we close it, let's create a new folder for the precomps in the scene and drag this precomp into it. Next, create a folder for the assets in the project and drag the color palette and the solids folder into it. We can tag the main comp in blue and press control S to save the project. With this, we finished the lesson. I hope you enjoyed it and learned valuable techniques for animating in after effects. See you in the next lesson. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 29. Section 7: Text on 3D Objects: Hi there. In this lesson, we dive further into the world of typography in three dimensional space. We will create a super cool animation that's perfect for phone screen resolution. The lesson is split up into three parts. First, we'll start by designing the scene and checking out the cinema Four D renderer. Next up, we'll animate the scene, make a new camera with a more interesting angle, render the animation and get everything organized. Finally, we'll learn how to swap out the text and design in the scene without messing up the animation. It's going to be awesome. Let's get started. 30. Learn to combine text layers with 3D objects: As always, let's lunch after effects together, close this window. And in order to see the same panel arrangements, let's click on Default. Now let's create a new composition. We'll call it text animation seven. For this project, we will be using a mobile screen format of 1,920 pixels in height and 1080 pixels in width, with 24 frames per second. The composition will last 10 seconds and we will change the background to black after clicking. Okay, go to the Three D Renderer and select Cinema Four D Renderer for this project. The reason for this will be explained later. Now let's set the preview screen to fit so that we can see the entire scene. Next, let's import the color palette into the project. Double click on the gray area in the project panel, select the color palette, and click on Import. All right, first things first, let's pick the text tool and type in animated. Now select the text, and let's change the color to white. Then set the size to 100. And change the Fanta Ezra Bold. We want to make sure it's perfectly centered and left aligned. Let's head over to the paragraph settings. To center the layer in the composition, we'll use the aligned tool and click here and here. And lastly, to get the anchor point perfectly centered, just press Control Alt Home. Now let's select the rectangle tool and create the rectangle that should be behind the text. Before we do that, we need to make sure we don't have the text layer selected. Because if we create the rectangle, while the text layer is selected, a mask will be created, and that's not what we want. Let's make sure no layer is selected and create the rectangle. Let's create it with an approximate size like this. Now open the rectangle and its path unlock the size. Enter precise measurements. Here, there's no real reason for this. I just wanted to show you how to change the size of the rectangle correctly. Okay, now let's lock the size again, close it, and color the rectangle with the orange color from the palette. Now let's position this layer below the text and change the text color to the dark color from the palette. Now let's go back to the selection tool. Set the screen back to fit and precompose these layers. Select the layers and press control Shift C. Let's call this pre comp, text comp one. Make sure both of these boxes are selected and click Okay. Now let's learn how to convert this shape into a real three D object. Let's enter this pre comp and convert these two layers into three layers. But before, let's enlarge this panel and zoom in a bit so we can see better what we are doing. Now click here to convert these layers into a three layers. Ensure that your renderer is set to cinema four D. Now to see what we're doing, let's change the view to custom view one. If we zoom in a bit more to see the text up close, we can see something weird in the text. It happens because the text layer and the rectangle layer overlap each other. To avoid this, select the text. Press P to display the position parameter and move the text layer on its axis. To separate it from the rectangle, we don't need to move it too far. Just enter minus one here. Great problem solved. Now let's convert this shape into a real three D object. To do that, we need to open this layer and access the property called Geometry options. Here we'll find a property named Extrusion Depth. Set it to 100. And there you have it. But as you can see, its sides have the same color as the rectangle. Let's learn how to change the color of the sides. First, let's select the color palette so that we can see the colors. You can close this. Now next we need to open the contents and select Rectangle One. Now let's click on the small arrow next to the word ad. We'll navigate to side and choose color. Now we can sample the bright color from the palette. Let's also color the backside of this rectangle. To view the backside, we can change the view to back. This way we'll see our scene from behind. All right, as before, let's select Rectangle. One, click on the small arrow, and this time choose back. Then select color. Let's pick the pink color this time. Now let's close this layer and create the text that will be positioned here on the back side of this three D shape. To achieve this, let's duplicate the existing text in the composition. Now press P and move this layer on its axis. I realized that I was moving the layer in the wrong direction because I still couldn't see it. Let's move it in the opposite direction. And now we see the layer. Now let's change the view to top to figure out where to place this layer. We can see it here. From this angle, we can see exactly how far to move it. Now we should aim to position it very close to the back of the rectangle at a value of 100 because the thickness of the rectangle was set to 100 in the extrusion depth property. But we don't want the text to sit directly on the rectangle. We'll write 101 instead. Now that we've adjusted the positioning, we can see that the text fits perfectly when viewed from behind. To complete the process, we just need to flip the layer horizontally by right clicking, selecting transform, and choosing flip horizontal. Great, let's close the layer and go back to custom V one. Now pay attention when we rotate the rectangle, the text we have in this scene will stay in place. Question, do you know how to make sure the text stays in sync with the three D object when it moves. For this we need to use the parent and link function. Let's select these two layers and link them to the rectangle layer. Now select the rectangle and press R and check that everything is working correctly. Now all we have to do is center the anchor point of the rectangle so that it rotates from its center of mass. Currently, the anchor point is indeed centered on the layer's center. But because our rectangle is now a three D layer that has volume, we need to center the anchor point according to its volume. Let me show you what I mean. Let's set it back to zero. Let's set the view to top to see the scene from above. From here we can see that the anchor point is not centered in the middle of the rectangle. Let's select the anchor point tool because the extrusion depth size of the rectangle is 100. We will move the anchor point until we see it at 50 here, meaning exactly half of 100. Then we'll hit the apostrophe key to bring up the grid and find the center of the composition. After that, we'll switch back to the selection tool and move the rectangle to the center of the composition. As you can see, there is the center of this comp. Move it here, excellent. Now we're ready to return to the active camera and continue. Now let's reduce the size of this prep. As you can see, the size of this pre comp is very large at the moment, meaning there's a lot of unnecessary space. Let's press control K to get to the composition settings and reduce the size to match the rectangle. Then let's reduce it until we get the right size. Here in width, we'll write 900. And here in height, let's try 200. Maybe 300, I think 250 is the best option. That's better. Let's press okay. Now let's press the apostrophe key to hide the grid and continue. Let's switch the view to back in order to see the back of the rectangle here. We'll change the text to typography. Now let's go back to the selection tool and slightly raise this layer. Excellent, now let's switch back to active camera and raise this text layer as well. Select it and drag it upwards from the y axis. All right, we're done with the design. Let's go back to the main composition. Turn off the background. Now let's duplicate this pre comp. Before that, let's set the preview to fit. Now let's lower the layer. You can press the apostrophe key to see the grid position, this layer here. Now let's select it and press control D to duplicate it. Next, let's move this layer here. Because the snapping function is enabled, I can't place this layer exactly where I want it. I'll turn it off. Now let's position this layer directly above the previous one. You can move it with the arrows on the keyboard. Now, press the apostrophe key to hide the grid. It's not really helping us, for now. Let's duplicate this layer and move it above the previous one. Let's do this a few times until we reach the top. Okay, so now we can display the grid. Now let's select all the layers and move them down while holding down the shift key. Let's position the layers in the center of the composition. Great, now we're ready to move on to the next part and animate the scene. But before we move on, I wanted to give you a heads up about something important. We forgot to save the project when we first started working on it. That could be a problem if the software crashes, which happens a lot with after effects. And then we need to start over from scratch. To avoid this, I recommend that you save your project right after creating the first composition, because that way we activate the autosave function. All right, let's press control now, find the folder for this lesson. Let's enter the AE folder, select this project, and replace the extension with seven. Once you've done this, press save and keep working on your scene without any worries. Now we can move on to the next part to animate the scene. See you there. 31. Let's animate the scene: All right, so let's start to animate this scene. Let's enter the pre comp we created. Select the rectangle and press R to see the rotation parameter. Now let's animate the rotation of the rectangle on the y axis. At the beginning of the animation, we'll create a key frame with a value of zero. Now let's move to the second number two and change the value to -180 degrees so that at this point we can see the word behind the rectangle. Now let's move to the second number four and change the value until we complete a full rotation. Here it should be zero and here you should see minus one. Let's see how it turned out. Now let's make this animation a bit more interesting. Convert the keyframes to as E's hold down the Alt key and double click on one of the key frames. Change the influence to 85% by 85% and see how it looks. Now looks great. Now let's make this animation play in an infinite loop. We'll do that using an expression for this. We'll hover over the stopwatch icon of this parameter. Hold down the alt key, and click on the stopwatch. Once. Now let's click on the small arrow, go to Property, and select this expression. Now click here to finish the action. Now even after the key frames end, the animation we created will repeat itself endlessly. Okay, now let's go back to our main composition and see how the animation looks. As you can see, we can indeed see the rotation, but something strange is happening in this part. To fix this, we need to apply the collapse function to all the layers. For those who don't see the icon, you can click here. Now let's activate the function for all the layers there. We have fixed the issue. As you can see, the preview playback is very slow. To speed this up, let's change the preview quality to quarter. Great, Now we need to create an offset for the layers so that each layer rotates one after the other. For this, we can use the plug in we installed in the previous lessons called Juice Tools Shifter. If you close this panel and don't see it, you can find it in window. I'll release this panel from the workflow area so that it's more convenient for us to work. Now with all our layers selected. Let's see how the animation will look if we choose to apply the offset to this shape. This time we'll set it to two frames. Meaning the distance between each layer will be two frames. Now let's press stagger. As you can see, due to the offset of the layers, We don't see these layers in the first few seconds of the animation. Let's learn how to fix this. But first, let's bring this panel back to the workflow area. Don't close it for now, because we'll go back to it shortly. Now let's stand at a point where we already see all the layers. Let's shorten the work area to here using the key, let's turn on the background to see the scene a bit better. Now let's make the scene look more interesting with the help of a camera. For this, let's right click here, go to New, and select Camera Here. We'll choose one node camera this time, let's select 15 millimeters and hit Okay. Now let's position the camera where we can see the scene properly. For that, let's work with two views. In this view, we see our scene from a top angle, meaning from above. If you don't see the scene from the top in this view, then click here to select this view. You can ensure that you selected this view by this blue frame. All right, and now set this view to the top. In this view, we see what the camera sees from this view. We see the all scene from the top. Okay, Now let's select the camera, press P and move it backward by changing the value of the Z axis. Let's move it until we see that all the layers are within the boundaries of the scene. Let's move the time indicator to see what happens at the beginning of the animation. I see that at this point the object goes out of the frame. Let's move the camera a bit further back. This is much better. All right, now that we have positioned the camera, let's go back to work with one view and create a background for the scene. For this press control y, change the background color to a dark color from the palette press. Okay, and place the solid layer below all the other layers. Now let's see the animation we created. Be patient and give after effects some time to render the preview. As you can see, the layers start rotating from the bottomost layer. That's what we indicated when we created the offset using the plug in. Now I want to reverse the order of the animation. That is, the offset should start from the topmost layer. This is something that can happen to you frequently during the process. We create a specific offset and then want to reverse it. It's important to know how to do it. To do this, let's select all the layers and align them back to the beginning of the timeline. Ensure that the time indicator is at the beginning of the animation. And now press the left bracket key. This aligns all the layers with the position of the time indicator. All right, now before using the plug in, once again, let's set the preview screen to fit to see all the layers. Great. Now select all the layers once again. And let's open the plug in again. Let's attach it here, we can resize it a bit. Now let's choose this arrangement. Two frames is good. Now let's click on Stagger. Let's see the animation. Now that's better. All right, and now we can close the plug in. Let's also shrink this area. Now let's save the project. Before we move on, press control S. Now let's make some adjustments to the design. I think the text here is too big. Let's go back to the text composition. Select this text layer, press S, and reduce its size a bit. Let's write -80 minus, because we flip this layer horizontally in the past. Let's also reduce the size of the front text. Select this layer, press and reduce it to 80 as well. By the way, you don't have to use the words I wrote. You can change the word, font, and colors as you like. Okay, let's go back to the main composition and see how it looks. I think it looks better this way. Now let's create a loop for our animation before we render it. First, let's capture the first frame in this animation. We'll stand at the beginning of the work area and click here. Now let's move a few seconds forward in time and try to compare the frames. I'm completely off track. Let's try this frame. We're getting closer. Let's try here. Almost there. Let's try this frame. Okay, the exact time point is 8 seconds and 22 frames. Let's shorten the work area to this point. Press N Now let's check the end of this animation and try to make sure that when it starts over there are no jumps. Let's see it again. In my opinion, it looks excellent. We're ready to render the project. For that, let's press control. Choose to render it in the H 0.264 high quality format. And select the render folder for the output. Make sure the name is good. Click on Save and then press Render. Let's wait for a few moments now. Let's see what we got. It looks great. As usual, you can upload this video on social networks, display it on your portfolio website, and of course, use this animation for your next project. All right, now let's go back to our project and organize it. Before we learn how to add new pre comps with different designs and texts to this animation, you can close this panel and close this pre comp. Let's go to the project panel. Create a folder called pre comps. Drag the pre comp we created into it. Next, create another folder called Assets. And drag the color palette and the solids folder into it. Now let's label the main composition in blue. Hit Control as to save the project and bring the quality back to full. Now we are ready to move on to the next part to learn how to deal with changes in this project. I'll see you in the next one. 32. Learn to replace precomps like a pro: Welcome back. As you can see, all of our pre comps are composed of the same design and text. Let's see what we need to do to create pre comps with the exact same animation but with different designs and text. Currently, if we enter this pre comp and want to change only the color of the rectangle, it will change in all the other pre comps in the scene. All right, so I'll press control Z, and let's see how to do it in the right way. First, we need to duplicate this pre comp through the project panel. We can find this pre comp in the pre comp folder we created earlier, Press control D to duplicate it. Now we have a new precomp with a two suffix at the end of its name. Let's enter this precomp. We can select the color palette from here to see the colors. Now let's change the back color of the rectangle to blue. Next, let's close the layer and change this text to something else. Double click on this layer and type the word design. Now let's move to the beginning of the animation. So we can see the front part here. Let's change the text to the word motion. Next, let's select the rectangle. Choose the rectangle tool to see its color. Change it from here, or we could change it through the layer itself. For that, we'll press the U key twice. This way we can see all the parameters affecting this layer, including the color of the rectangle. All right, let's change the color to white, which is currently the color of the sides. Let's also change the color of this word to blue. Let's color the sides orange. Finally, let's change the color of this text layer to white. Close this layer. As you can see, we made several changes to the new pre comp we created. Now let's go back to the main composition and see how we can integrate the new pre comp into our animation. But before that, let's switch back to the selection tool. There are two ways to insert the new comp into our scene. The first one is we can drag the new pre comp like this and then try to find a good spot for it in the scene. In this way, we will have to perform all the changes we did for the rest of the pre comps in the scene. It can take some time, or instead of doing all that, we can simply select the pre comp we want to replace in our scene. And then drag the new pre comp onto it while holding down the Alt key. There you have it. We have quickly and easily swapped between the pre comps. Okay, let's also replace this pre comp with the new pre comp. To practice it. Once again, select the pre comp we want to replace in our scene. Now let's drag the new pre comp onto it while holding the Alt key. Let's do it one more time for the first pre comp. That's it. With this, we have completed the lesson. If you're enjoying the course, I would greatly appreciate it if you could rate this course based on your experience and leave feedback so I know if you found it interesting or not. I recommend watching the last part of this lesson, once again to understand the topic of swapping precomps better. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 33. Section 8: 3D Text Animation: Hi there. In this lesson we're going to learn how to create an awesome three D animation using Cinema four D renderer. We'll be focusing on making a cool text animation on a path. And we'll go over some essential techniques for dealing with complex projects to make things easy to follow. We'll be breaking the lesson down into three parts. In the first part, we'll start by creating the initial text and learn how to position it on a closed path. Then we'll animate the first text and move on to creating the second text while positioning it on an open path. In the second part, we'll create a new camera and adjust the layer positions to achieve a more intriguing angle. Then we'll animate the second text. In the third part, we'll create an eye catching background using some simple effects. After that, we'll render our scene and learn how to make changes to the text while keeping the project organized. Let's get started and make something amazing. 34. Text on paths: Let's open after effects, close this window, And to ensure that we all see the same panel layouts, let's click on Default. Now let's create our first composition. We'll name it text animation eight. We'll work in full HD format, which means 1,920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels in height. Then set the frame rate to 24 frames per second. The duration of the composition will be 10 seconds and we'll leave the background black. Now go to the Three D Renderer and change the renderer to Cinema Four D, and click Okay. All right, now let's import the color palette to the project. Double click on the gray area in the project panel, select the color palette, and click on Import. Now let's save the project and give it a name. Find the folder we created for the lesson. Enter the AE folder. Select this project to copy its name and change the number to eight. Then click on Save. Let's create the first text. Select the text tool and type typography. Now double click on the text to select it and choose the Sra font. Let's change the style to black, the size to 100, color the text white and enable uppercase. Also, let's go to Paragraph and ensure that the text is centered. Now let's align the layer to the center of the composition using a line. Click once, here and here. The last thing we'll do is center the anchor point of this layer using the shortcut control. Great, let's make this text circular. For that, let's long press the rectangle tool and choose the ellipse tool. Now select the text layer and create an elliptical mask. Hold down the shift key while creating the ellipse to make it symmetrical. Now press the apostrophe key to show the grid and switch back to the selection tool. Double click on the mask and move it to the center of the composition. We need the small anchor point of this mask to be located at the center of the scene. Excellent, let's slightly enlarge this panel, close the mask, and open the text. Now open the path options of the text and select that. Its path follows the current mask. Now in order to extract the text from the circle, we'll click here. This way the text will be positioned above the mask. Now let's make the text spread across the circular path. We can do it by increasing the size of the font. Let's set it to 200. Now set the character tracking to 120. Then we can select the mask by double clicking on it and scale it symmetrically. For this, we'll hold the shift and control keys and drag it like this. Next, let's center the anchor point of the letters to the center. For this, we will close the path options and open more options. As you may recall in this section, we can adjust the anchor points of the letters. Let's move them to the center of the letters. By entering -45 I will zoom in to show you the specific anchor points which are represented by these small red crosses. All right, now that we have done this, let's move on to learning how to rotate the letters as demonstrated in the example. First, we can select the text and create a new animator with a rotation parameter. But pay attention when I change the values here, the letters will rotate to the side instead of inward. I will press control Z to undo my actions. Therefore, in order to make the letters rotate inward in a three dimensional space, we first need to transform them into three D letters through the animator. Let's select that. Here you can see that all the letters are currently in three D. Now we can create a new animator with the rotation parameter. Now we have several rotation axis. This is the axis for sideways rotation, the Y axis for sideways rotation in a three dimensional space. And the X axis for rotation inward and outward in a three dimensional space. We'll animate the X axis because we want all the letters to move together. We don't need to use offset to animate the rotation as we did before. This time will animate the value directly. This ensures that all the letters rotate together. Let's make sure we are at the beginning of the timeline. And let's create the first key frame here. Now let's move to the end of the timeline and change the value here to minus three. That means three complete rotations in the outward direction. Let's see how it looks. Working with three text and after effects may slow down the playback rendering time. So be patient with it. Let's wait a couple of seconds and see it one more time. Okay, it looks good. Now we can give a name to our animator. For this, close the animator, press enter on it and change the name to animator rotation. Press enter once again to complete the action. Now let's transform the letters into three dimensional objects with real three dimensional volume. For this, we'll open the geometry options to better see what we're doing. Let's change the angle to custom view one. Zoom in a bit. Now let's add some depth to the letters. From here you can write 50. Now let's add some shading to the letters. Let's close the geometry options and open the material options. Let's enlarge this panel a bit so we can see all the parameters. And zoom in even more to see the characters up close. Now in metal, right, zero. And reflect intensity, right, 50. And reflect sharpness, right? Zero. In reflection falloff, write 100. Now we can see some shadows on the letters. I particularly like the shadows that are created in the circular parts of the letters, like here in the letter G. Okay, so let's set the preview screen to fit and close the material options. Now let's color the edges of the text with a different color. For this, we'll select the text from here at a new animator. Go to side, then color and choose RGB. Now let's take the eyedropper and sample the blue color from the palette. Let's change the original color of the text. For this, we'll select the text layer and choose the eye dropper from here. Let's choose this color. Now let's move forward a bit in the timeline so that we can see the back part of the text. Now let's color the back part of the text with a different color. For this, we won't create a new animator. We'll select this animator and add a new parameter to it. Click on that, go to back, and then go to Color, and choose RGB. Let's color the back of the text with this blue color. This time let's enter the color and darken it a bit. Now click Okay. Since we finished designing the text, we can go back to see the scene from the original point of view. Let's change the view to active camera one. Now we can select this animator, press enter and change the name to animator colors. Okay, let's close all the parameters of the layer and see how it looks. As you can see the preview playback is very slow. When we work with the cinema four D renderer to make it easier for after effects, we can do two main things. First, we can reduce the quality of the preview screen. Here, let's select quarter. The second thing we can do is go to the preview tab. For those who don't see this panel, you can find it under window. To use the preview tab, we need to select the compositions panel. We want to make changes. Here we can ask after effects not to render every frame in our animation. We can tell it to skip every second frame. This means that now after effects, we'll skip two frames while rendering the playback preview. This causes the preview playback rendering time to be faster. It might look a bit choppy during playback, but at least we'll see the overall motion. And that's what is important for us right now. It's a great solution, especially for those with older computers or for really complex scenes with lots of layers and effects. All right, let's press control as to save the project before we move on. Now let's create the second text. We don't want any distractions, so let's turn off that layer for now. Now let's select the text tool in, right? Super cool, three text animation. Let's select the text and reduce its size to 100. Keep all the other settings as they are for now. Let's just change the color to orange. Then let's not forget to go to the paragraph panel to ensure that the text is centered. Now let's go to a line and center the layer to the composition center. Finally, let's center the anchor point of this layer using the shortcut control Alt home. Now let's go back to the selection tool and create a mask for this text as well. But this time we won't create the mask with the ellipse tool. We'll create the mask using the pen tool because we want this text to be on an open path. Let's select the Pen tool. Now select the layer of this text. And click here once to start creating the mask. Now go over here, hold down the shift key, and click once again. This way the line will come out straight. Now let's go to the path options of the text and choose that its paths should follow the current mask. Let's enlarge the panel a bit. Then let's close the path options and open more options. Let's center the anchor points of these letters as well. Set it to -45 Now let's convert these letters to three D layers. Before we create a rotation animator, we'll select the text here, click on Animate and choose Enable per character, three D. Now let's create an animator with the rotation parameter. We will focus on the x axis as before. This time we do want the letters to rotate one after the other. We will control the animation through the offset. When we control the animation using the offset of the animator, we do need to set a changing point for it. This means that we need to set the range selector of the X axis to one. This tells after effects that when we move the offset, the characters start moving one after the other and make a full rotation each. Now let's open the range selector and Advanced enlarge the panel a bit. Now let's change the animation shape of this animator to ramp up so that the rotation starts from the first letter. Next, let's change the offset to -100 and create the first key frame at this point in time. Now let's move to the end of the timeline and change the offset to 100. Let's see how it looks. All right, now let's change the name of this animator to animator rotation and close it. Next, go to geometry options, and before we add some depth to the letters, let's change the view to custom view one. Let's zoom in a bit and change the quality to full so we can see what we're doing. Now let's decide how much depth we want to give to this text. I think 20 is enough. Let's close it and open material options. And let's change the settings. As we did for the previous text in metal, we'll write zero and reflect intensity, we'll write 50 and reflect sharpness, we'll write zero. In reflection fall off, we'll write 100. Now let's color the sides in the back of the letters as we did for the previous text. But instead of creating a new animator, we can simply open the animator of this layer and copy the colors. Animator select it and press control C. Now let's select the text here and press control V to paste the animator. Now let's open it and change the colors. Color the side and pink. Let's color the back and pink as well, but this time make it a bit darker shade. Let's see how it looks. I think we need to darken the color a bit more in the back. Great, that's better. Now let's close the layer and go back to the active camera. Now let's turn on the second layer. I think we need to enlarge this text a bit more open character and increase the font size to 200. Okay, that's much better. Now let's move on to the next part and learn how we can make this scene look much more interesting by placing the layers in the three D space. And we will do that in the next part. So see you there. 35. Animating 3D text on path: All right, so first to differentiate between the layers, we can tag this layer in blue and that one in yellow. Now let's select this layer in press R. Let's rotate it on the y axis by -90 degrees. Now let's close it and create a new camera in the scene. Right click here, go to New and select Camera. We will use the one node camera this time again, let's choose a lens width of 15 millimeters to create a more interesting camera angle. Now let's select the camera press and move it to the side. Let's decrease the quality to quarter so that the project moves a bit faster. Let's move the camera here. Now select this layer, press R and rotate it on the Y axis. Let's write -30 degrees. Now let's select this layer, press R and rotate it on the Y axis as well. Let's set it to -60 degrees. Now you can close the grid. We don't need it anymore. Question, what is the shortcut for opening and closing the grid? Press the apostrophe key to do that. Now let's go back to the selection tool and move this layer to the right and a little down. Now let's create a path and a wavy shape for this layer. For this, we'll need to adjust the mask we created for this layer. But as you can see, because of the camera angle, we can't see the points of the mask on this layer at all. Let's rotate this layer like this for now. Now bring the points closer to each other. Let's select this point and move it here. Now select this one and move it here. Then let's rotate the text by -46 degrees. Now select the point of the mask path and create additional points on it. For this, select the pen tool. Click here once to create a new point on the path. And now let's move it here. We can now move this point further away. Next, let's select this point. But before we do that, I want you to pay attention to the icon of the cursor. This icon indicates that if we select this point, we will actually close the mask. This happens because we are currently selected on the last point. If we click on this point, after effects think that we want to close the path of the mask. To prevent this from happening, we can choose the selection tool and then select the point and move it outside the frame. Now let's select this point and make it rounded for this long, press the pen tool and choose the convert vertex tool. Now click on this point once to round it. Let's do the same for this point and this one as well. Now let's go back to the selection tool and adjust the hands we created here. Great, now we'll follow this path next. Let's animate this text. Close the layer, enlarge the panel a bit. Let's reopen the layer. Close the transforms. Now open the text, Open the path options, and animate the parameter called first margin. Let's drag the value to this side until we can't see the text in the scene. Let's hold the shift key while doing this. That way the value will change in bigger sacraments, And now at this point in time, create the first keyframe where the text is at the value we just set. Now let's move to the end of the timeline and change the value until the text exits the scene from the side. Change the value while holding the shift key. All right, now let's see what we've got. All right, in my opinion, we can rotate this layer a bit. Let's close it, select it, and press R. Let's rotate it around the Y axis, set it to -40 Now let's zoom out a bit and see how it looks. Let's select this point and move it here. And the handle here. I'm just trying to create an interesting path for this text. Change the positions of the points and play with their handles until you achieve something you're satisfied with. After making some adjustments, always check your animation to see how it looks in motion. I think we can rotate the layer a bit more in this direction. Okay, I'm quite satisfied with this path, but now I see that the text is very far from its starting point. Let's bring it closer a bit. For this, we'll select the layer press and change the value in the first margin parameter that responsible for the texts movement on the path. Okay, it looks better now. And now select this layer, and let's adjust this point once again. Excellent, I love the way the text is getting out of the frame. And now let's press control les, close the layer, and move on to the next part to create a background for our scene. 36. How to deal with changes: Welcome back to create a new background, we will create a new solid to do this. Press Control. Why? Now let's change the color. Now, move this layer below all the layers. Okay, now set the previous screen to fit, turn off the text layers, and set the quality back to full. Now let's improve the design of the background and make it more interesting using an effect we used in the second lesson called grid drag the effect onto the solid. Let's move the points of the effect to the sides until only the horizontal lines are visible. Next, increase the thickness of the lines. Set it to 50. Move this point a little to the left, and this point a little to the right. Now let's change the color of the lines to black so that they blend nicely with our background color. Finally, change the blending mode to add, maybe multiply. Now let's add an additional effect to the background called wave wrap. Let's increase the wave width to 200. Change the wave type to triangle so that the wave is sharp. Now let's change the angle of the wave motion. Currently it looks like this. Let's change it to 130. In my opinion, it looks a bit better with this angle. Now it has a slightly smoother motion. Great. Now let's turn on all the layers again and adjust the visibility of the background according to the extreme camera angle we have here. I'll explain what I mean. Let's turn off the layers again. Now let's add a corner pin effect, drag the effect onto the background. And if we zoom out a bit, we can see there are four points here. Let's move this point down here while holding the shift key. And move this point here. Let's move this point down and this one up here. Now in order not to see the black parts, select the solid process and increase the scale of this layer to 150. We can move it a bit. There you have it. We created a background that appears at a certain angle that visually fits our camera angle. Now let's turn on all the layers. You can close this one, press control to save the project and set the preview screen to fit. Now let's go to Preview and set the render of the preview back to zero as it was at the beginning. Now press the Spacebar to see the entire animation before rendering it. It may take some time because there are many three D layers here. Let's wait until the preview playback finishes rendering, and let's see the scene one more time. All right, I think everything looks great and we are ready to render the scene. For that, let's press control M. Choose to render it in the H 0.264 high quality format, which is a high quality MP four, and select to render it to our render folder. Make sure the name is good. Click on S and then click on Render. Let's wait a few moments. Okay, now let's see what we got. It looks great. As usual, you can upload this video on social media and display it on your portfolio website, and of course, use this animation for your next project. Okay, now let's go back to our project and learn how to replace the text in the animation we created for demonstration. Let's duplicate this comp from here. Press control D, change its name to text. Animation eight, underscore two, and enter the new pre comp. Now let's isolate this layer so that we only see it. Click here to do it. Double click on the text and type animation or any other word you want. As you can see, the letter count in this word is different from the previous one. Therefore, we got this empty space here. That's not a problem. To fix this, we need to select the text and increase the font size or scale down the mask itself. I'll press control Z to undo the action. And let's see how to do it by adjusting the mask. For this, let's select the selection tool. Double click on the mask, and while holding down the control and shift keys. Let's scale it down. Of course, we can combine both solutions. For example, we can slightly reduce the mask and increase the font size. All right, after learning how to make changes on a text with a closed path, let's learn how to do it on the text with an open path like the text layer we have here in our scene. First, let's select the word super and delete all this part. Now we have a shorter sentence. Since the length of the text in this layer has changed, we also need to change the animation for this layer according to the new text length. Which means we need to adjust the key frames on this layer. For this, let's press, you now hover over the first keyframe and change the initial position of the text. At this point in time, we need to bring the text a bit closer to the scene. Now let's move to the second key frame and adjust it as well. Let's zoom out a bit so we can see where the text is. Let's bring this text closer to the scene. Great, now let's say that we want to increase the font size of this text, let's say to 250. In such cases, it's important to make sure that the first and last positions of the text are correct, meaning that we don't see the text within the scene. As you can see here. We will see it because we increase the font size. Let's fix it. Go to the first key frame and adjust it. Now let's check the last keyframe. Because we increase the font size, the text remained in the scene. Therefore, let's adjust this key frame as well until it looks like the text has exited the scene. Okay, now let's see what we need to do if we want to change the colors of the texts. First, let's set the preview screen to fit. Select this layer and press the Ukey twice. This way we can see all the parameters we changed in this layer. Here we see the colors of the animator for this text layer. The same goes for this layer. All right, that's it for the lesson. Let's close this pre comp and go to the project panel to organize the project. Before we close it, first of all, let's long press the vertex tool and switch back to the regular pen tool. Let's also long press the ellipse tool and switch it back to the rectangle tool. Now let's select the selection tool and click here on the project panel. Now create a folder called precomps. Drag the pre comp we created into it. Next, let's create another folder called assets. Drag the solids folder and our color palette into it. Then let's tag the main composition in blue. And let's press control as to save the project before closing it. That's it for the lesson. If you're enjoying the course, I would greatly appreciate it if you could rate this course based on how you feel and leave feedback. So I know if you learn something new or not. In the meantime, you can close the project and we'll meet again in the next and final lesson in this course. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 37. Section 9: Stretched Text Animation: Hello and welcome back. We have reached the last lesson of this course. In this lesson, we will create an advanced stretch text animation. We will go back to basics and focus on the most important thing in after effects, the key frames. We'll break this lesson up into four parts. In part one, we'll get ready to start our animation by preparing our text and creating a stretched animation for the first letter. We'll also change up the thickness and shape of the letter. In part two, we'll keep going with the stretched animation, but this time we'll do it for the rest of the letters. We'll also improve the animation for all the letters. Part three is all about colors and creating a secondary animation. Lastly, in part four, we'll learn how to create a sweep effect on the text, create an animated grunge texture, and integrate that texture into the text using blending modes. Then we'll improve the appearance of the entire animation with a simple effect. We'll wrap things up by preparing the animation for sharing on social media and rendering it into a high quality MP four file before we say goodbye. As usual, we'll organize the project. It's going to be awesome, so let's get started. 38. Basics of stretched text animation: Let's lunch after effects. Close this window and make sure to hit Default. We all have the same panel set up, now let's click on New Composition. We'll name it Text animation nine. Then let's move on to three D renderer, since in the previous lesson we change the renderer to cinema four D, Let's switch it back to classic three D. Now let's go back to Basic and set the resolution to full HD. We'll work at 24 frames per second, then set the duration to 10 seconds. Finally, let's change the background to black, and click okay, here and here. Now, before we dive into the last lesson, I just wanted to remind you of a few important things while working with after effects. First, if you see the preview screen like this, don't worry, it's probably because your caps lock key is on. Just turn it off and everything should be back to normal. Next, when you're working on a project in after effects, make sure you switch your computer's language to English. This way, all the shortcuts we use will work properly. If you don't see the background color, then simply click here. Now if you see the numbers here differently from mine, make sure to zoom out the timeline panel. Now you can hover your mouse here, hold down the control or a command key, and click on the numbers here. These numbers represent the duration of our composition timeline. We can see it in frames or in seconds. Then if you see the preview screen smaller or larger than mine, simply click here and select Fit. Finally, click here and change the preview quality here to full. Because in the previous lesson we dealt with effects. We see this panel and not the project panel. If you see this area like this, just click on the arrows here and Project to get to the project panel, great. And now we are ready to import the assets we'll be using in this lesson. Double click on the gray area in the project panel. Find the folder we created for the lesson and enter the Assets folder. Select this image called black wall and the color palette. Then hit Import. Okay, so now we can save the project and give it a name. Let's find the folder we created for the lesson. Go into the A folder and name the after effects file we're currently working on. You can select this project for the name to change and replace the extension with nine. Then click on Save. Now go to the project panel and select the color palette and create our text. Choose the text tool and select the font Monserrat right away. Here's a helpful tip for you guys. When creating a stretch text animation, it's best to use San Sera fonts, which are those without the small decorative strokes at the end of each letter known as ser. Let's choose the Monserrat font for the style. Choose the light or the thin version. I go for the thin version, then write the word bounce. Next, let's select the text and change the color to white. Click here for capital letters. I see that the spacing between the letters is too large for some reason. If it's the same for you, simply set it to zero. Now let's go to paragraph and make sure our text is centered in this case, and the writing direction is left to right. Now let's center the layer to the center of the composition using the Align tool. Click here and here. Now to center the anchor point of the layer, use the shortcut we learn and press Control Alt Home. Excellent. Now let's go back to character. And let's say that we have decided to increase the font to 200. Note that when we did this, the anchor point was no longer in the. Okay. Let's click here and see what to do in such situations. After we have made the design changes to the text, we can press control Alt home to return the anchor point to the center of the layer. And then press control home to center the layer in the composition. These are two shortcuts that work great when working with text and after effects. Okay, now in order to create the animation we see in the example, we need to convert this text layer into a shaped layer with a path similar to how we convert a text layer to create Outlines and Illustrator. This allows us to change the design of the text by moving and adjusting its path. Let's do it in after effects. First, right click on the layer. Go to Create, and select Create Shapes from Text. The original text layer will be automatically turned off. We don't need it, so we can delete it, select it, and press the backspace or the delete keys. In the next step, we can remove an unnecessary property that exists in these layers called merged paths. To quickly find it, we can type the word merge in the search bar. There we can see where this property is located in the layer. Let's select it and delete it. Let's delete it from here as well. Now we can close the search bar and learn how to prepare the text for a stretched animation. First, let's open this layer and its contents. As you can see, this layer consists of all these shapes. These are the shapes of the letters in this layer. In order to conveniently manipulate each letter separately, let's duplicate this layer five times, as that will give us six separate layers. We need six layers because that's the number of letters in this layer. Select this layer and press control D. Five times. Excellent. After duplicating, let's keep only one letter on each layer. I'll show you what I mean. Turn off the first five layers, then open the contents of this layer. And keep on the letter B here. Let's select the rest of the letters and delete them. Now we can close this layer and turn it off. Let's turn on this layer here, we will only keep the letter, therefore, let's delete the letter B and the rest of the letters except for the letter. Now, we can close this layer and turn it off. Next, let's turn this layer on and keep only the letter. Let's delete the letters. And B, and the rest of the letters except for the letter. Great. After that, this layer, we will only keep the letter in here, we'll keep the letter C. Finally, on this layer, keep only the letter. Very good. Next, turn on all the layers. Now let's change the names of the layers to the name of the letter they contain. Let's select this layer, press Enter and write. Then press Enter again, We will call this layer and so on. Now let's align the anchor points of all the layers to the center of each layer. If we turn off all the layers and select the selection tool, we can see that the anchor point of this layer is not located in the center of the layer. If we activate this layer, we can see that the anchor point here is also not located in the center of the layer. Let's turn on all the layers. Select all of them, and quickly move the anchor point to the center using the shortcut control. Great, Now all the anchor points of the layers are centered. All right, and now let's animate the first letter. For convenience, let's hide the rest of the layers from the panel. For this, let's select all the layers we want to hide. And click on the shy function located here. Okay, so let's mark all these layers as hidden layers. And also turn them off so as not to see them in the previous screen. Finally, to activate the shy function, click on the shy icon here as well. Now let's get a little closer to the letter, open this layer and its contents. As you can see, this shape is composed of three shapes that create the shape of the letter B. If we open each shape, we will notice that each shape has its own path. This is the exact parameter that we need to animate and create key frames for. However, instead of manually accessing all the paths of each letter, we can select this layer and type path in the search bar. This way, after effects will display all the paths that exist on this layer. All right, now let's create the first key frames at this specific time. At the second number zero, the shape of the letter looks exactly how I want it to be. Therefore, we will create initial key frames for the path. Now let's move to the second number one and change the shape of the letter. In other words, we need to modify the path. Let's see how to do it correctly. First of all, let's move the preview screen so that we can have a better view of the letter. For those who don't remember how to move the preview screen, simply hold down the space bar and drag the screen sideways using the mouse. Now let's zoom in a little bit more and see how to change the path of the letter at this particular time. In the meantime, please don't do it with me. I just want to explain to you how it works first, then we'll do it together. What we need to do is simply select the points of the path and move them to another location. Then automatically, new key frames will be created at the current time. This is what causes the shape of the letter to change. Okay, now I will press control Z until I return to the previous state. Now I will show you the issues we may encounter while creating text animations of this kind. Let's say I want the upper part of the letter to stretch upwards. I will select the desired points and move them upwards. As you can see, an incorrect shape of the letter has been created. This can happen to letters that have a rounded shape, like this part of the letter B. Let's see what needs to be done to prevent this. I'll press control now. Let's do it together. Let's get closer. As you can see, this area of the letter consists of only two points. What we need to do is add additional points for this. Let's select the pen tool. Let's get closer to this area a little more now, when we hover over the path with the pen tool, you'll see that the mouse cursor icon changes to a plus sign. That means that if we click here once, we will create an additional point. Let's create one point here as well. Now let's move down to the bottom part of the letter and create two points here as well. We can create one here and one here. Now let's step back a bit. Let's switch to the selection tool. Click on one of the points so that we can select multiple points at once. Now let's select all the points located in the lower part of the letter, except for the two new points we created. Now let's drag the selected points downwards while holding down the shift key. Now let's stretch the letter in the upper part as well. Let's select all the upper points except for the two points we created. I see that I didn't select all the points. Let me select them again. Okay, now let's drag the points upwards while holding down the shift key. Let's set the preview screen to fit. Select the lower points again, and drag them further downwards. Let's also drag the upper points. Let's see what we've got. Excellent, now let's make this animation pause for a second before we return the letter to its original shape. For this, we need to move 1 second forward to second number two. Now let's copy these key frames and paste them here. This way we create a lack of change in the key frames for a duration of 1 second, creating a 1 second pause in the animation. All right, let's move to the third second and return the letter to its initial shape Question, what do we need to do in order to restore the letter to its original shape? To achieve this, let's select the initial key frames. Copy and paste them here. Let's see how it looks excellent. If we want to create a longer pause, we can select those key frames and move them forward in time, for example, to the fourth second. Now throughout this time, there won't be any change in the animation, because those key frames are the same. The change will only occur when we have a change in key frames. Okay, now let's move the key frames back to the second number two and move on after we've animated the path. Let's make this letter thicker. There are several ways to do it. We'll do it in the simplest way ever, using the stroke of this shape. Let's go here and set the stroke color will be white and we'll change the thickness through the layer itself. For that, let's write stroke in the search bar. Now let's animate this property. We'll go to the beginning of the animation and create the first key frame with the stroke thickness of zero. Now to time the stroke animation with the path animation, let's press you. This will show all the key frames on this layer. Now let's go to the first, second and create key frames where the stroke thickness is 40. Next, let's go to the second number two and create the same key frames. Because here we have a pause in the animation for that, we'll press here. Now let's go to the third, second and create one final key frame with a stroke thickness of zero. Let's see what we've got. Let's make our letter narrower as it opens. For that, we need to modify the key frames of the path. It's very important to stand on the key frames that we want to change and only then make the adjustments. Now let's select one of the points. Now let's select all the points in this section using the arrow keys on the keyboard. We'll move the points to the left. You can press the shift key while doing this to make the points move in larger increments. Now to maintain the pause in the animation place the time indicator on these keyframes at second number two. Then copy the new key frames of the path and paste them here in their place. Let's see how it looks. Okay, now let's make this animation a bit more interesting by adding an additional animation using the scale parameter. To do this, let's select the layer and press now We'll set the initial size of this layer at the beginning of the animation. Next, let's press you to reveal all the key frames and time the scale animation with them. Now at frame number six, let's set the layer to shrink to 80% At frame number 12, let's restore the layers size to 100% Let's see how it looks. Okay, now let's create a scale animation when the letter starts returning to its original shape. Let's go to the second number two at this frame, let's set the layer size to be the same as it is now, which is 100% Now let's move six frames forward and set the layer to grow to 120% Next, move another six frames forward, and return the size to 100% Let's see how it looks. Okay, so far it doesn't look interesting. But trust me, we'll make it very interesting in a moment to make it more interesting, first, let's convert all the key frames we created into as key frames. Let's select all the key frames and press nine. Let's see it again, It already looks better. Now let's select only the key frames of the path and change their velocity. To do this, hold down the Alp key and double click on one of the key frames. Let's write 85, 85 here, press. Okay. Let's see how it looks. Great. Now let's change the velocity of the stroke key frames. But this time let's write 95 by 95 press, Okay, And let's see it one more time. Now let's change the velocity of the scale key frames. But this time let's use the graph editor. Now, right click here and make sure we are using the speed graph. Let's zoom in a bit. Now let's select this keyframe and drag its handle here. This handle here, it looks good. Let's do the same for these keyframes. Now let's exit the graph editor and see the entire animation from the beginning. Looks great. To make it more interesting, we can click on the scale parameter and move them one frame forward. Let's see it again now it looks better. It's a good time to press control S to save the project. Now let's move on to the next part. To animate the rest of the letters, it will be much easier than you think. 39. Advamced streched text animation: First, let's press here and unhide all the layers. Turn off this layer and disable the shy function for all of them. Then let's enable the shy function for this layer. Now let's press here to hide the layer that we have already animated. Then let's turn on all the layers and apply everything we have learned about the stretch animation to all the layers together at once. It may sound complicated, but it's not that difficult. Let's begin. First, let's select all the layers and type path in the search bar to see all the paths for each layer. Press Enter and enlarge this panel. Now at this point in time, which is at the second number zero, we will create key frames for everyone. Because at this point, all the letters should look as they currently do. Now to view only the key frames without all the parameters around, let's press the UK. We can minimize this panel and continue working next. Let's move to the second number one, as we have animated the first letter that way. And we'll change the shapes of the letters, but we don't know how far to stretch each letter. For that, we can click here to see the layer of the letter Be. Select it and see how far it extends at this point in time. Now let's press control to display the rulers. Let's drag the guides from the rulers. Place one here and another one here. After that, press control are again to hide the rulers. Now let's lock the guides so they don't interfere with our work. Go to View and select Lock Guides. Okay, now we know how far we need to stretch the rest of the letters. You can click here again to hide this layer from the panel. Once again, let's start to animate the letter O. As you remember, for letters that have rounded shapes, we need to create additional points in order to stretch them properly. Let's choose the pen tool. Select one of the points so we can see the path. Now don't do it with me because I want to remind you what I meant. If we drag these two points upwards, I won't get the desired effect. The same thing goes here. Therefore, we need to create additional points. All right, now let's do it together. Let's get a little closer. With the help of the pen tool, we'll create two points here. Two points here. Now let's zoom out a bit. Select the selection tool and select the points of the upper part of the letter. Let's get a little closer to see if we've selected everything we need. I see that I missed these two points, so I'll select everything again. Now we can zoom out and move them up while holding the shift key. Next, let's select the bottom points and move them down. Now let's move on to the letter you. Let's click on the path here and select the points in this section. Zoom out a bit and drag them up. Next, let's select the bottom points and drag them down. After that, let's select the path of the letter in. Select these points and drag them up. Now let's select these points and drag them down. Then let's move on to the letter C. Let's click on the path here and select the points in this section. Let's zoom in a bit, and as you can see, there is a rounded part here. Let's choose the pen tool and create additional points, one here and one here. Now let's switch back to the selection tool, select the points of the upper part of the letter and drag them up. Let's get a little, see if we've selected everything we need. I see that I missed these two points, so I'll select everything again and drag them up. Next, select these points and drag them down. Finally, let's select the path of the letter E. Select these points and drag them up. Then select the bottom points and drag them down. Great job. As you may remember, after stretching the letter B, we also made it narrower. Let's supply the same animation to these letters. Let's begin with the letter. Press its path to reveal the points. Now let's select the points on the right side of the letter and move them twice to the left using the left arrow key on the keyboard, while holding down the shift key. Now let's select the points on the left side and move them twice to the left while holding down the shift key again. Next let's select the path of the letter. We'll select this section and move it once to the left while holding down the shift key. The same goes for this side. Now let's move on to the letter. We'll select this portion and move it once to the left. Then select this section. And move it once to the right. Maybe one more time. Let's move this section once more. Okay, now let's move on to the letter C. But let's not forget to click on the path of this letter to see its points. Now let's select these points and move them twice to the right. Then we'll select this section and move it once to the left while holding down the shift key. The same applies here. Now do the same with the letter E. Select this side and move it twice to the left. Let's see how it looks. All right, I noticed that the letter doesn't look very good. Let's adjust its path a bit. To do that, we'll select its path. Note that it's crucial to hover over the key frame we want to change. In order to change the path properly, bring the time indicator here while holding down the shift key. This way, the time indicator will snap to the nearest key frames. Now zoom in and select this point first. Like that, only then click on the desired point. Let's move this point slightly upward. Now let's do the same for the upper part. We can fine tune the position of this point using the arrow keys. Okay, now let's take a step back and reach the second number two. Up until this point, we don't want any changes in the animation of the pads. Therefore, we need to have the exact same key frames as in the second number one. To achieve that, let's press here. There we have created key frames just like this. Now let's move to the second number three and restore the paths to their initial shape. But if we select all the key frames of all the layers in this way, we'll copy and paste the layers. Instead of just pasting the key frames, I pasted the layers. And that's not what I want to prevent that, we need to copy and paste key frames of one layer at a time. I'll press control Z to undo my action. To copy only the key frames, we need to copy them one by one from each layer. Let's select this keyframe, Press control C, and now press control V to paste it at the location of the time indicator. Let's do the same for the other layers. Here we can copy these two key frames because both belong to the same layer. Excellent, now let's select all the key frames and press F nine and change their velocity to do this, hold down the Alp key and double click on one of the key frames. Let's write 85, 85 here, just like we did for the letter B in the beginning. Okay, after adjusting the path, let's make the letters thicker and create an animation for their stroke. Just like we did with the letter B. Let's select all the layers. Go to the beginning of the animation and choose white as the stroke color. Now let's go to the search bar and type stroke. Enlarge this panel a bit. Now let's create the first key frames for everyone at this time. And change the value of the stroke to zero. Now let's press you to see only the key frames without the other parameters around. Next, let's move to the second number one, and create key frames with a value of 40 for each. Then let's move 1 second forward and press here to create key frames without any changes in value because we have a pause in the animation at this time. Now let's go to the end of the animation and change the value to zero. After that, select only the key frames of stroke to see only them. Let's type stroke again in the search bar and press Enter. Now let's select all of them and press F nine. Then hold the Alt key and double click on one of them to access the keyframe velocity panel, set it to 95, 95, just like we did for the letter B in the beginning. Great. Now let's display all the key frames by hitting the U key and see the animation we created. Okay, now we just need to create the scale animation as we did for the letter B. For that we can click here to display the letter B. Select it and press S to display its scale parameter. Now we can select it and press control C to copy the keyframes on it. We can hide this layer again. Now let's select all the letters and press control V to paste the key frames. To see the new key frames, let's press you once, and then once again enlarge this panel a bit and move the pasted key frames one frame forward, just like we did with the letter B. Let's see how it looks. Okay, now let's bring letter, be back to the panel, turn it on, and disable the shy function. Now let's make sure we're not selecting any layer, Press you once and then again to see all the key frames of all the layers. Let's scale down this panel and see the entire animation we've created so far. I think the letters are too far apart from each other. Let's bring them closer to each other. Please pay attention to this part because it's very important to know how to adjust the design of your scene, especially after we've already animated the letters. This means that we need to adjust the key frames we created for the path. Let's see how to do it first. Let's make sure we're not selecting any layer and type path in the search bar to see all the key frames of all the layers in the layers panel. We need to rearrange the panels as we did in lesson four. Okay, let's remember how to do that First, let's drag this panel to the side. Next, let's enlarge it a bit. Let's also enlarge the preview. We can shrink this area like this to see more of the timeline. We can right click here, go to Columns, and click on Stretch. Now we have more room here. Let's hide this area as well. Right click again. Go to Columns and click on Parent and Link. Great, now we can zoom in on the time line to see the key frames up close. Now let's proceed to adjust the key frames. First of all, let's bring the time indicator to the position of the key frames we want to adjust or change. Let's place it at the beginning of the animation, at the second number zero, where are the first key frames of the path located? And then move it to the left. All right, let's move on. It's very important not select all the key frames, but select or hover over the specific key frame you want to change. Let's also move the letter with the letter U. We will move to the right for the letter we need to select both key frames, and then move them slightly to the right as well. Finally, let's select the key frames of the letter B and move them to the right two. Now let's move on to the last key frames. It's important to move the time indicator while holding down the shift key in order to place the time indicator exactly on the key frames. Let's change them to key frames as in the beginning. Select these key frames, press control C, and then control V to paste them in the current position. Let's do this for the rest of the layers. I see that the letter C touches the letter. Let's fix that. Let's stand on the key frame when it happens in the second key frame. Now let's select this keyframe and move the letter slightly to the left. We also need to change this keyframe to maintain the pause correctly. Let's stand on it, copy this keyframe and paste it here. Let's see how it looks. I think it's good. Now we can return the panel arrangement to its original state. First of all, close the search bar. Let's drag this panel down and release it. When we see the bottom area turn light gray. Now let's restore the hidden functions. Right click here, go to columns and click on stretch. Right click again, go to columns and click on parent and link. All right, we're done with the difficult and the complicated part of this animation. Now let's move on to the fun part and improve the appearance and animation of our scene. But before that, you might want to take a quick break for about 10 minutes. Get up from your chair, stretch a bit, and make yourself some coffee. It'll give you a chance to recharge your brain before the next lesson. See you there. 40. Improving the look and the animation: Let's start by coloring the letters. We can change the color from here, but then we need to color the stroke in the same color. This method is great for those who want to color the fill and the stroke in different colors. In our case, we want each letter to be painted in one color. If we do it this way, it will be a bit challenging, because if we want to change the color, we will need to change the color of both the fill and the stroke. It's less convenient. Let's see how to do it correctly. Go to effects and presets and look for an effect called pill. Now let's drag the effect onto the layer of the letter to see our color palette, let's drag it into the scene. Now let's go back to effect controls. And to see the effect, we need to select this layer. Let's change the color of the effect to this color. Let's drag the effect onto the letter and change it to this color. Let's continue doing this for the rest of the letters. We can darken this color a bit. Okay, so we can delete the palette for now. Now let's move on to creating the offset for our animation. Let's decide that the letter B will start moving first, so we'll leave it in its place. Now let's move forward three frames. We can zoom in a bit. Now let's select all the layers except for the letter B and move them here. Now let's move another three frames and move these layers here. Continue doing this until the last layer. We can unselect this layer by holding down the control key and clicking on it. Now let's move three frames forward and press the left bracket key. Once again, let's hold down the control key and click on this layer to unselect it. Move three frames forward and press the left bracket key. Let's do this one last time. Great. Now let's see how it looks. Looks good. But in my opinion, the offset is a bit too big. Let's select the layers we moved and move them two frames back. Let's hold control and click on the layer to unselect it and move the selected layers two frames back. Let's continue doing this until the last layer. I intentionally repeat these actions so that you get used to pressing the correct keys, so your workflow will be super efficient. Now as you can see, because these layers start from here, we can't see the letters at the beginning of the animation. Let's select all the layers we moved and extend them like this until all the layers reach the beginning of the animation. Now let's trim them using the shortcut Alt and left bracket. With that, we have finished creating the offset for the layers. All right, let's move on now. Once the animation of the letters is complete, can nest all the layers into a pre comp. For this we will use the shortcut control shift C, Name it, main text animation. Make sure both are selected and click Okay. Let's press control as to save the project before we continue. Now let's enter the new composition and resize it to eliminate any empty and unnecessary space. Press control K to access these composition settings. Ensure that preview is selected. And now let's adjust the dimensions. Set the width to 1,200 and the height to 700. Now let's delete the guides because we no longer need them. Go to View and click on Clear Guides. Next, let's navigate to the end of the time line and shorten the work area so that we can still see all the layers. Position the time indicator here and press in to trim the unnecessary part. Right click and select Trim Comp two, work area. Now let's return to the main composition and enable collapse on this pre comp to see it at its maximum quality. We no longer need the guides here either, but this time let's learn how to hide them. To do this, use the shortcut control and the semical and key. Excellent. Now let's make the animation even more impressive by adding a scale animation. Let's create the first key frame at the beginning of the animation, because we want the layer to be at its current size at that point. Now let's go to frame 12 and scale this layer asymmetrically using the Value property. Click here to unlock the dimensions of this property and set it to 50. All right, now let's go to the first, second and restore the layer to its original size as it was at the beginning to 100 here. Moving on, let's reach the point where the text returns to its initial state. Let's create key frames with the current value, because up to this point we want the layer to maintain its current size. Now let's move 12 frames forward and change the value to 120. Finally, in the third second, let's return the layer to its original size. Now let's select all the key frames and apply some easing using F nine. Next, let's adjust the velocity of these key frames using the graph editor. Select the key frames here and move their handles to the left. Let's do the same on the other side. Let's apply these changes to these key frames as well. Exit the graph editor and see how it looks. It doesn't look good. Let's try to shorten all these key frames. Let's go to frame number 12 and select them. Now, hold down the Alt key and move the last keyframe towards the time indicator while holding down the shift key. Let's see it now that's better. Let's do the same here. Now let's match the scale animation to the scale animation we have in the letters animation select all these key frames and move them one frame forward. I think the timing is better. Now, I'm showing you this method, so you understand that when we create an animation, we never know where to place the key frames or the timing precisely. We constantly make changes while working. All right, and now that we've got the text animation done, let's see how we can make it look even better. See you in the next part. 41. Use simple effects and advanced functions to improve the animation: Welcome back. Let's make it look even better. First of all, let's enlarge this entire layer in the scene. However, if we enlarge it through the scale parameter, we will ruin the animation because we already have key frames in this parameter. When we enlarge the layer, new key frames will be created, which is not what we want. Do it correctly, we can use a null object. What is a null object in after effects? A null object is a type of layer that does not render or appear on the previous screen, but can be used as a reference point for other layers in the composition. It's an invisible layer that can be used to control the position, rotation, scale, and other properties of other layers in the composition. One of the main advantages of using a null object is that it allows you to control multiple layers at once rather than having to adjust each layer individually. For example, you can parent several layers to a null object and then control the layers with the null. Let's create a new null object. Right click here, go to Nu and select null object. The null is placed in the center of the layer, and that is excellent. Now we can link our precomp to the null layer using the parent and link. Let's drag the pick whip of the precomp to the null. Let's select the null layer and process to display the scale parameter of this layer. Now when we enlarge it, the precomp text will also scale accordingly. Let's write 150. Now we can delete the null. Excellent, let's create this cool sweep that goes over the text. For this, let's make sure we are not selecting any layer. Then go ahead and select the rectangle tool. Turn off the stroke and leave the white color. Again, I remind you to make sure we are not selecting anything. And now let's create a rectangle. Now select it here and press R. Let's rotate this layer 20 degrees. Go back to the selection tool and move the layer here. Now let's animate it. First of all, let's go to the beginning of the animation and press P to see the position parameter. Create the first key frame when the layer is in its current position. Then go to the second one and move the layer here while holding the shift key so that the layer moves in a straight line. Now let's select the key frames and press F nine. Then hold the Alt key and double click on one of the key frames. Set it to 85, 85 here and press okay. After that we can cut the layer. Now press Alt and the right bracket. Now let's find the point in time when we want the sweep to start. Let's start it at frame number 12, just before the text stretches to its maximum nice. Now in order for this sweep to be visible only on the edges of the text, we can use the track mat function and make this layer as an alpha of the pre comp layer after effects. A track mat is a function that allows you to use one layer to control the visibility or transparency of another layer. Specifically, an alpha mat is a type of track mat that uses the alpha channel, which is the transparency information of one layer to determine the visibility of another layer. I am talking about this topic in depth and one of the lessons in the free course that I mentioned at the beginning of this course. If you want to understand this topic in depth, feel free to watch the lesson. You can find the link to it in the PDF file located in the main folder that you downloaded from me. All right, let's click here and pull the pick whip of the track Matt's layer onto the text pre comp. We can also see the text. Let's turn it back on. Let's see how it looks. Now you can change the color of the sweet to any other color. I'll leave it in white. Now we can press to see the opacity parameter and reduce the opacity to 50. Let's see how it looks. Looks nice. Now let's duplicate this layer. Press control D, and move the new layer slightly forward in time. Let's see it again. Maybe a little bit more. That's better. All right, let's move on. Now, let's select this layer, press Enter and change its name to sweep one. For this layer, we'll call it sweep two. Now let's create this grungy look that we see in the final result. First we need to create an animation for a specific texture and then combine it with the text. Let's get started and create the animation for the grungy texture. For this, we'll use the image of the blackboard that we have in the project. If we zoom out a bit, we can see that this image is very large for a more convenient workflow. Let's go ahead and create a new empty composition, where we'll create the animation for this image. To create a new composition, let's use the shortcut control. Now let's define the settings for the new composition. First of all, let's name it grunge texture. Change the size to the size we're currently working with, which is 1,920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels in height. We'll leave the frame rate at 24, and the duration of this composition will be 15 seconds. Now turn off the background and drag the image here, because the image is quite large. Let's press S and scale it down. Let's try 45. Maybe 50. That's better. Now let's animate this layer. For this, we will animate the rotation and the position parameters. Let's start with the position parameter, press P and create the first key frames at the beginning of the timeline. Now let's press to see the rotation parameter key frames here as well. Now to see all the key frames, let's press you after that, let's zoom in on the timeline and move four frames forward. Now let's rotate the layer like this. Okay, I see that we've scaled it down too much. Let's enlarge it symmetrically. Hold down the shift key while scaling it. That should be enough. Now let's move the layer's position here. Then let's move another four frames forward. Rotate the layer and move it to a different position. Let's continue doing this a few more times. Our goal is to create a different appearance in the scene every four frames. All right, let's see how it looks. I see that at this point, the image went up too much. Let's stand on these key frames and adjust the layer's position slightly downwards. Now the layer is always within the scene boundaries. And now to make this animation more interesting, we need to select all the key frames. Right click on one of them and convert them into toggle hold key frames. Now the animation will look like this in a stop motion style, but the movement seems too fast. Let's get to second number one. And when all the key frames are selected, hold down the alt key and move the last keyframe to the position of the time indicator while holding down the shift key as well. I think it looks better this way. Now we need to make this animation play endlessly. To achieve this, we need to create an expression, just as we did in previous lessons. Let's hold the Alt key and click once on the stopwatch icon of the position parameter. Now click here on the small arrow, go to property and select the expression called Loopout cycle. Now click here to finish the action. Next, let's write, click on the parameter and copy only the expression. And then paste it onto the rotation parameter. Press control V. Now even after the end of the key frames, the animation loops and continues to play. I think it's excellent. Let's see it one more time up. Now let's close the layer and go back to our main composition to integrate this animation with the text. First, let's drag the new pre comp into our composition. Again, to see the texture only within the text boundaries. We will drag the pickwhip of the track mad of the pre comp texture onto the prep of the text. Excellent. And to blend the texture with the text colors, we can click here and choose interesting blending modes. But instead of going in manually to check each blending mode, we can simply select this layer, hold down the shift key, and press the plus or minus key. This way we can switch quickly between different blending modes. In our case, we will choose Color Dodge to refine the texture a bit. We can search for the effect called levels, drag it onto this pre comp. And adjust the sliders here until we achieve an interesting result. We can also add an additional effect called curves and control the contrast of the texture. Okay, let's close the effects and zoom in a bit to see how it looks. If you want to disable the effect on this layer, you can click here and quickly turn off the effects. Let's see how it all looks together. I think the texture is a bit too strong. So let's press the key and lower the opacity a bit. Let's set it to 50. I think that looks better. Furthermore, we can improve the visibility of our text animation even further with a cool effect called turbulent displays. To use this effect properly, let's create an adjustment layer. Right click. Go to New and choose adjustment layer. An adjustment layer is an empty layer created at the composition size where we can apply effects and create filters for our scene. All right, now let's write turbulent displace here, drag the effect onto the adjustment layer and adjust the parameters. Let's zoom in a bit. Our goal is to make the text appear less rigid. We want to give it a slightly distorted look. Let's experiment with these two parameters until we achieve the desired result. I believe ten for amount and five for size should work well. Now let's deactivate the effect and zoom in a bit to observe how it looks with and without the effect. In my opinion, we still need to make some adjustments to the parameters. That's better. Now let's make this thing move. Let's open the evolution options and adjust the parameter that controls the randomness of the effect. But instead of creating key frames, we will use a very simple expression. Let's hold down the Alt key and click once on the Stop witch of the property called Random Seed. Now let's scroll down a bit and write in the expression line time multiplied by eight. Now let's click here to finish the action and see what we've got. There you have it. The text shape is moving in a cool chunky and random way. Now let's close all the parameters of this layer and change its name to the name of the effect. We can select the effect here. Press Enter and copy the name with control C. Let's select the adjustment layer, press Enter and paste the name with control V. Excellent, let's set the preview screen to fit and see what we've got. Now let's make this animation play in a grungy way. We can do it using a posturized time effect. To use this effect on the entire scene, we can create a new adjustment layer and add this effect to it. Go to the effects tab and search for posturized time effect. Now we can set the frame rate to 12, making this animation look like it's playing on 12 frames per second. Let's see how it looks. Looks nice. Now you can set it to eight frames per second if you want it to play, even in a more chunky way. Let's see it again. All right, let's set it back to 12 and move on. But before that press control S to save the project. Now let's copy the effects name and paste it on the adjustment layer. Great. Now let's return to the project panel, select the color palette and create a new solid for the background Press control Y. Next, sample this color and press okay. Then move the solid down before rendering the scene. Let's trim the work area to avoid rendering unnecessary parts in the timeline. Now go to the second number, 3.12 frames and press in. Now let's watch it one more time before rendering. Okay, I think it looks excellent. Now let's press control and choose to render it in the high quality 0.264 format, which is a high quality MP four format. Then we'll choose to render it to our render folder. Let's make sure the name is good. Click on Save, and then click on Render. Let's wait for a moment. Okay, now let's see what we've got. It looks fantastic. As usual, you can upload this video on social media and display it on your portfolio website, and of course, use this animation for your next project. Okay, now let's go back to our project and organize it. Before we close it, we can close this panel and these precomps. Let's go to the project panel and create a folder called assets. We'll drag the color palette, the texture image, and the solids folder into it. Now let's create another folder called precomps. And drag all the precomps we created in the project into it, except for the main composition. Let's tag the main composition in blue with this. We have completed the final lesson of this course. If you found the course enjoyable, kindly rate it based on your experience and provide feedback. Congratulations to all for the hard work and I look forward to seeing you in the next course. 42. Text in Motion project task: Hey there, Awesome job on completing all the lessons and making it to the home task stage. Your task is to come up with a super cool title using four or five different types of text animation. Just like I did in this example. You have complete freedom to be creative and experiment with the colors, text, and animation techniques that we learned in the course. You can even add some funky background animations to make the title more catchy. I'm really excited to see what you come up with. 43. Outro: Ladies and gentlemen, we have come to the end of this journey. I want to take a moment to reflect on how far you come, you level up your skills, brought text to life, and join the vibrant world of motion design. Now it's time for you to take everything you learn and apply it to your own project. Whether you're looking to impress your clients or spice up your portfolio website, now you have the skills and the knowledge to bring your visions to life. And remember this course is just the beginning. Motion design is a constantly evolving field, and there's always more to learn and explore. So keep experimenting, pushing your boundaries and sharing your creations with the world. I want to thank each and every one of you for being part of this journey, and I can't wait to see you in the next one.