Text Animators: Custom Text Animation in Adobe After Effects

1. Welcome: Animating texts is something every motion designer will need to know how to do at some point. But even if you're not a motion designer, if you make videos of any kind, being able to animate texts is a super handy skill. And, you don't need any prior experience with Adobe After Effects to create custom text animation. This class is all you need. Welcome to Text Animators: Custom Text Animation in Adobe After Effects. In this class, you'll learn all about After Effects built-in system specifically designed to animate text. I'm Megan Friesth and I'm an explanimator. I write, illustrate, and animate educational animations, mostly on health and environment-related topics. While there are a lot of different ways to animate texts, some of which I've covered in other classes. The benefit of using text animators is that it's easy to change what the text says even after you've created the animation. Plus, you can save the animation as a preset, so you can easily reuse it on any text layer, in any After Effects project; no need to import anything. You can even share text animation presets with others. Text animators work a little bit differently than other types of animation in After Effects. This means that if you already have experience with After Effects animation, but haven't touched text animators, you'll get a lot out of this class. But it also means that you don't need to know a ton about After Effects to be successful. In fact, if you've never used After Effects before, you can watch my free orientation video and then you'll be ready to go for this class. In the first part of this class, I'll show you how text animators work and go through some essential things that you'll need to know. You'll also get these free guides to help you remember what the different options do. There are a ton of different properties and methods for animating texts with text animators, I'll show you how to create a handful of different examples that demonstrate a wide range of possibilities. Using what you learn, you'll be able to create your own custom text animations. So if you're ready to master text animators, then let's get started. 2. Text Basics: Let's go over some of the basics of working with texts and after effects just to make sure we're on the same page. To create text, you just want to go up to the text tool up here and then click anywhere in your composition. Then you can start typing. Then to get out of the text tool, just go up to this arrow tool right here, the selection tool. Over in the Character panel, you can adjust the settings of your texts. You could change the font or the weight and you can adjust the size. If you want to reposition your text, you can just click and drag it to move it. Or you can go over here and toggle down the layer and then toggle down next to transform and then you can adjust any of the transform properties. You can also adjust the colors by clicking here. You can flip the stroke and fill or easily choose black or white by just selecting these buttons right here. Then you can also do all the normal texts adjustment things down below. To edit your text just double-click on it to select it, and then click again to get the cursor to edit. Use the selection tool to get out of that editing. This text is just going be in one line. If you were to add more to it, you'd have to hit "Enter" to add more. I'm just going to delete this to show you how to make paragraph text. First go up to the text tool. Now instead of just clicking to start typing, you want to click and drag to create a text area. Now, you can make paragraph texts. It'll just fill the area that you've created and then you can use the paragraph panel to align that text in any way that you'd like. If you needed to convert paragraph texts back to line texts or vice versa. What you want to do is go to the Text tool and then right-click on your text, and then choose Convert to point text. Even though this doesn't look like anything has changed, notice how there's no textbox, a solid red line around this that we could adjust. If you wanted to make this all on one line, you just have to go in and delete the return. If you want to convert it back to paragraph text, just go back up to the text tool. Right-click, convert to paragraph text. Now when you click into the text, you can see that textbox that you can resize. If you told on a text layer, the first thing is going to be text, which is obviously things that are specific to text layers. Then you also just have the normal transform properties. The first thing underneath texts is source text. This is actually what the text says and you can key-frame this value. Let's say we want this to say text layer here and then once it gets to one second, we want to change what this says. With a key-frame already set. We can just go in and change this. Now, once we play this back, once it gets through this second key-frame, it'll just automatically change what that text says. These are whole key-frames, so there's not going to be any animation in-between them, which is a sudden jump between what it says. Next is path options and this is how you can have text on a path or a shape. To create a shape that your text is going to align to, there's a couple of ways you can do it. First, you need to make sure that you have your text layer selected. Then you can either use the shape tool, which if you click and hold, there's additional shapes here. Or you could use the pen tool if you just wanted to create a line. I'm going to use the pen tool and just click and drag to create a wavy line. You can always go back in and edit these handles to adjust your line after you've created it. Now if I toggle down the path Options, I can go to this drop-down and select mask one. Now the text is going to align to that path and setting that up has given us a bunch more options. We could choose to reverse the path. We could choose to make this perpendicular to the path so notice how the letters are all upright. Then when they're like this, they more aligned to the path. You can also force alignment, which will just stretch them out to fill the whole path and you can move the text along the path by adjusting the first margin or the last margin. Once we get into text animators just know that you can use text animators and have your texts beyond a path like this. That can be a really creative way to get something totally unique. To animate a text layer, you could obviously animate the transform properties here. For example, to create a very simple text animation, you could just animate the position and maybe also the opacity. By just doing some simple Key-framing like this. Maybe we'll add an easy ease, and there we go. But what if I wanted to move this text layer later on? If I'd move it, then it's going to set another position key-frame because I've already key-framed the position, so that's going to make things a little bit more tricky to work with and I also can animate each individual letter. In order to do that, I would have to duplicate this text layer. Let's hide the first one. Go in and delete all the letters except for the t. Now the spacing is going to be off. Then for the next one, I would have to go in, delete all the letters except for the e. Then now I have to adjust the position and you can see how this is getting really messy and really tedious. But there's definitely a better way to do that and that is what texts animators, which is what the rest of this class we'll focus on. I just undid everything I did to the text layer. This has no animation, it's just a simple texts layer. Before we actually get into creating our own texts animators, I wanted to just show you that there's some default ones built into After Effects. If you go to your Effects and Presets panel, which if you don't see this go under Window and then you can find it here. Once you locate the effects and presets panel, then toggle down Animation Presets, then presets. Then you can go into the text folder and here's a bunch of different presets for texts. The ones you're most likely to want to use are probably in the animating in or animate out folders. To apply a preset to a text layer there's a couple of ways to do it. Let's just locate a good one. Let's use typewriter. You can either just drag it onto the layer and wherever your play head is, that's where the animation will start. If you hit " U" on the keyboard, you can see that it's pasted key-frames starting at my play head. Then if you play it back, you can see what it does. Then you can go in and adjust the key-frames like this to speed it up or however you want to adjust it. If you decide that you want to remove this preset, this text animator that you've applied to your layer, just make sure that the layer is selected. Then go up to your animation and choose remove all text animators. You can preview these text animators by applying them to your texts. Another way to apply a text animator is just to have the layer selected and double-click on the preset. Then again, remember it's going to paste those key-frames wherever your play head is. This one is a little bit crazy. If you go up to the hamburger menu next to effects and presets, you can go to browse presets, and this will open up Adobe Bridge. From here, you can go into the text folder and then you can preview any of these animations without having to actually apply them to any texts and After Effects, you can just watch them all here. Now, you'll notice that a lot of these are outdated looking and ugly, maybe a little too crazy. But there are some good ones like the typewriter one is simple and works well, but others you probably don't want to use unless you're trying to make like a satire of the '90s. Now that you know the basics of working with text layers, in the rest of the class, we'll dive into animating texts with text animators. 3. How Text Animators Work: Let's look at how we can animate this text layer with text animators. If you go over to this "Animate" button, these are a bunch of different properties so you can animate. For the first example, let's just do scale. This is going to add Animator 1 and this is a text animator. If I adjust this scale value, you can see that each letter is scaling. Instead of scaling the entire text layer as one thing, it's scaling each individual letter. If you wanted to change how the letters scale up, you can go underneath More Options and under Grouping Alignment, you can move these little x's. See these little x's here represent where it's going to be scaling from. This is a little anchor point. Now if I adjust the scale value, you can see that this is going to scale in the center of each letter. You can also change the anchor point grouping. Right now, each character is scaling, but you could change it so that each word scales so that would look like this or you could also change it to line or to all the text on the layer. I'm going to set it back to character and then let's look at how you would actually animate this with the text animator. We can just close up the More Options for now. Let's say that I want this to scale from 25% to 100%. I could just key-frame this, like this, but this is going to scale each letter at the same time. Everything is scaling at once. If you wanted to have more of a waterfall effect where the T starts first and then the E and then the X and so on, then we need to use the range selector. I'm just going to delete these key-frames on the scale property to show you the range selector. How the range selector works is that it applies the value set for whatever property you are working with. In this case, scale to a selected part of your text. right now it's applying 25% scale to my entire text layer. You can tell because the start value is at 0%, which is indicated by this red line at the start of the texts and the n value is at 100%, which is indicated by this red line at the end of the text. If you don't see red star and n lines, make sure that range selector is selected here. If I adjust the start value, you can see that it's moving the selector and the text that's not within the selector goes back to 100% scale, which is what you can think of as the default look for this text, 100% scale. You can tell what part of the text lies within the text lecture by the start and end red lines. The little triangles point to what's inside of this selection. You can also adjust the star or n values in the composition viewer by dragging the line by the little triangle part. Make sure you see this icon for your cursor. I'm going to set this back to 100% and let's look at how I would actually animate this text animator to make these letters scale from 25% to 100%. What I would do is go to the start of the timeline and I'm going to animate the offset value. I'm going to hit the stopwatch for the offset to be at 0%, then go to like, let's just do one second and set the offset to be 100%. Now you can see that this is going to animate each letter scaling up from 25% to 100%. What animating the offset does is it animates the selector from all the way on the text to all the way off the text. When a letter is within the selector, it's going to have a 25% scale applied to it and when a letter is outside this selector, it will have the default 100% scale applied to it. As the selector moves from covering all of the texts to covering none of the text, each letter animates from 25% to 100%. This is how I and probably most motion designers like to animate text animators. You can achieve a similar result by animating the start value from 0-100%. But you'll see in the next video why it's often better to animate the offset. Now that we have this text animator set up, it's actually very easy to change what the text says or change the style of the text and still have the animation work in the same exact way. If I just double-click on this text layer, I could go in and change this to something else and then the text animation is still going to work the same exact way. You could also go over to the Character Panel and change the font and the animation is still going to work in the same exact way. I'm just going to undo to get back to how we had it. You can change things like the font size and the text animator still works or you could even go and animate or adjust the transform properties. If I wanted to move this text, I can do that. If I wanted to scale this text, I could do that and it doesn't affect the scaling that I have for the text animator. All of this is really handy so that you can create text animation that's easily reusable and adjustable. If you change what your text says to be a lot shorter or a lot longer, then it's going to change how the speed of your text animator looks. But you can adjust the timing by dragging your key-frames to make the animation faster or slower. Let's look at a few other options that you have. Under Animator 1, underneath Range Selector, there's going to be an advanced toggle. If you toggle that down, you can choose based on characters excluding spaces, words, or lines. Let's just change this to words. Now you can see that it's going to scale in text and then animators, so there're two different words here. If I had multiple lines, I could change that based on two lines and then it's just going to animate the first line and then the second line. Those are some easy options that you can adjust. Right now this text animation looks very mechanical, one letter animates in at a time. In the next video, we'll look at how to make the animations on the letters overlap so that it looks more smooth. 4. Selector Shapes: When using the range selector to animate texts, you have the option to change the shape of that selector to get different effects. This can help smooth out a text animation. To get to those options, you want to have the animator open, the range selector open, and then go under advanced. Then right here you have the shape. This is going to be the shape of the selector. By default, it's going to be square. Let's look at the other options. Let's just choose ramp up. Changing this to ramp up affects how the text looks and the text animation. It's not animating each letter from 25 percent to 100 percent, it's starting halfway through. What we need to do to fix this is just set the opposite. Instead of starting from zero percent, we need to actually start it from negative 100 percent. Now this is going to go from negative 100 percent to 100 percent. See how it changes the text animation. Now each letter is going to start animating a little bit after the letter before it. Instead of just one letter at a time like we had it before, this is making more of a waterfall effect. Let's compare the animation that we had before where the selector was set to square and the animation that we have now where the selector is set to ramp up. In the last video, I mentioned that it's beneficial to animate the offset value rather than the start value, even though it seems like you could achieve the same look. Let me show you why that is. If I delete these keyframes on the offset and just set it back to zero percent, and then just try to animate the same thing with the start value, you can't actually move the start value to negative 100 percent. You'd have to just go from zero to 100 percent until you're stuck with an animation that looks like it's starting already halfway through. You can only animate like that. I'm going to undo all that to get back to how I had it animated before. It's better to animate the offset value because when you have a shape that's not square, you can push the selector all the way to the left by setting the offset value to negative 100 percent and then you can push it all the way to the right by animating it to 100 percent. To help you see what the different selector shapes that you can choose from here do, I created this visual for you. For each of the different selector shapes you can choose from, I created an actual shape, that is the shape of that selector. Then I just moved that through the texts to help you visualize what the selector actually is doing. These are all animated from negative 100 percent offset to 100 percent offset and then back again. This visual also explains why when we were animating with just the default square shape, that we could start with animating at zero percent because at zero percent with the square selector, your entire text is going to be influenced by the selector. Whereas with ramp up at zero percent, the selector is covering your text also but that makes it so that it looks like the animation is already halfway through. When using ramp up, you want to animate from negative 100 percent which pushes the selector all the way to the left but still affects all of the text. Then as it animates to 100 percent, it's going to animate all the way off of your text. When animating texts and I find that a lot of times, I use ramp up because it animates things nicely with that waterfall effect. I really use triangle round or smooth because all this is doing is moving a shape through the text. The starting and ending looks are the same. 5. Properties: You can have a text animator that animates multiple properties at once. This is just our first example where it just scaled up. Let me show you how you can add another property's animator at the same time. If we toggle this down, you can go under animator one. This just has the scale property. If you click on this "Add" button, you can add something like rotation or any of these other properties. Let's just look at adding a rotation to this. It's added this rotation property. Now if I set a value here, let's just do -20, at the same time as the scale is animating in because of the animation on the offset, this rotation is going to also animate from -20 back to the default position of zero. You can see what that looks here here. You can add as many properties as you want to the same text animator. We can also add an opacity. Just set this to zero, and then this will fade in as it's rotating and scaling up. I'm not going to go through all of the different properties that you can animate, but I encourage you to explore them so you can create something really creative and unique. 6. Easing: Whenever you're animating something, it's a good idea to go in and adjust the temporal interpolation of your animation to make it look a little bit more realistic or interesting. Here's a reminder of what temporal interpolation is. So I just have this shape moving across the screen, and right now it's moving at a constant speed the whole time. So this is just a linear movement, and you can tell because these keyframes are diamond shapes. If I go and select the keyframes, I can right-click, go to Keyframe Assistant, and then Easy Ease. It's going to change those to hourglass shapes. Now if I play this back, you can tell that it moves slow, quick in the middle, and then slow again. So it's easing out of the first keyframe, and then easing into the second keyframe. Now the motion is not so linear and mechanical. So in other words, what I've done is adjusted the temporal interpolation. A lot of times you might hear motion designers talk about this as easing. As you've already seen texts animators work a little bit differently than other types of animation in after effects. Let's look at how we can add easing to text animators. To demonstrate this, I'm going to create a new text animator on a new text layer. I'm just going to toggle down, go to the Animate button, and this time let's animate the position. Let's create a new text animator with the position property. So I'm just going to drag the y position up to, let's say -200. Then I just want to have this move down and into place. To do that, I'm going to toggle down the range selector, and let's go into Advanced and change the selector shape right away. I'm going to change this to ramp up, and then let's animate the offset from -100 to 100. I'm going to set my work area to just like two seconds by moving my play head here, and then hitting the "N" key on the keyboard. This will just make it so that it just previews these two seconds. Here's what we have so far. I'm going to also animate the opacity here because I think it'll make it easier to see when we go and adjust the easing. To add a property to animate under the same animator, you just want to go to that animator and then click on this "Add" button. Then if you go to property, you can choose to add any of these properties to the existing animator. I'm going to choose Opacity, and that's going to add it right below the position. I'm going to set the opacity to 0%, so now as the offset value animates, it's going to animate the position from -200 and the opacity from 0%. It's now going to look like this. To adjust the easing on a text animator, you want to adjust the ease high and ease low values here. I'm just going to set the ease high to be 100%, and let's play this back. With the ramp-up and ease high, the text is going to start off animating really slow, and then animate faster as it gets closer to its final position. If I were to switch this, so ease high is at zero and ease low as 100%, it's going to do the opposite. Now it's going to start animating fast and then slow down as it reaches the second keyframe. You could also change this to something like 50% and 50%, so it doesn't have to be just all ease higher, just all ease low. That will look something like this. This is smoother on both ends of the animation. When you're adjusting these easing values, the shape of your selector makes a difference in how the easing will actually look. I've made two different visuals to help you see what those look like. So in this visual, I'm just comparing ease high and ease low for the ramp up and ramp down and select our shapes. You can see the ease high and ramp up is very similar to ramp down and ease low, and then ramp down and ease high is similar to ramp up and ease low. They flip-flop in how they work. The second visual shows how the selector shape is actually changing when you change the easing values. So here I have the ease high set to 100%. This shape was the original, and now with ease high on ramp up, it's going to act more like this shape, and that goes for all of these. When you're animating with text animators and adjusting the selector shape and the easing, you can always just play around with it and see what looks best. But if these visuals help you, you can return to these as a reference to figure out what you need. Also, if you go back into the selector shapes visual, each of these selectors shapes our composition, so if you double-click on any of these, you can see the ease high and ease low, and how those look with that selector shape. For a square, it doesn't actually make sense for the shape of this lecture to change, but if you look carefully at the selector as it moves across, you can see that when ease high is set to 100%, is going to quickly change characters as the selector is going over them. As it's like a partially selected character, it's going to quickly change values. Whereas with ease low, it's going to take longer to change values when it's partially selected. 7. Multiple Animators: So far we've looked at examples with only one text animator. A text animator can have multiple properties that it animates, but with just one text animator, the properties are animated at the same time. Now let's look at an example with multiple text animators. This allows you to animate properties at different times to create more complex animations. Before I animate this, I'm just going to set up a guide layer so I can tell where the baseline of my text is. If you don't already see the rulers, you can just Hit Command or Control R to bring them up, and then if you drag from the ruler, you can bring a guide down into your composition. I'm just going to bring that guide down to sit right at the bottom of my texts, so as I'm animating, I know where the final position of this should be. Now I'm going to toggle down the layer and let's go to the Animate button to create a text animator. I'm going to animate the position of this. Like the tech says, I'm going to make it look bouncy, like it's going to come in, dip down, go back up, and then finally settle into position. It's not like a realistic physics-based bounce, like a bouncing ball, but just like a more flowing animation to animate each character in. Now with this Animator 1 position, I'm just going to set the position value to negative 200. That'll be for the position to be up here. I'm going to animate this in using the offset value. Under Range Selector, I'm going to set the offset from negative 100, and then let's go like one second, and then set this to 100. Then under the advanced toggle, let's also adjust the shape of this lecture to be ramp-up. Now this is going to have the B start first and then do a waterfall effect all the way through to the Y. This is like the examples that you've seen already. I'm going to adjust the easing values on these, so let's have the ease low be 100%. That way it'll just slow down as it reaches its final position, so nice and smooth. Now I'm going to add another text animator so that instead of it just landing right on the baseline, in its final resting position right away, it's going to dip down and then that'll be the second text animator. The third text animator will have it bounced back up and then it will land in place after that. I'm just going to close up this first text animator just to have some more room here, and then making sure that I have text selected right here, I'm going to go back to this animate button and choose position. If you didn't have that selected, it might not create a new animator for you. Now you should have Animator 1 and Animator 2. Once you start to have multiple animators, it can be helpful to name them so that you know what's what. Let's just go Click on Animator 1 and Hit Return, now we can rename this. I'll just name this fall, and then Animator 2 will be like when it dips below this baseline here, so let's Hit Enter and name this dip. Now let's set the position value for this dip. I'm just going to make sure that my play head is after this first animation has already finished, so I'll just put the play head on one second where that keyframe is. These little circles represent those keyframes, and they're represented as circles because this layer is closed up. Now I'm just going to bring the position value down. Maybe let's do like 100. That'll bring it dipping below the baseline. Let's go into the range selector and then we can animate this. We'll set a keyframe, make this negative 100. Then let's go to two seconds and animate this to 100. Then let's also go under advanced and change this from square to ramp up. For the ease high and low, I want to ease out of the first keyframe, this one, and then into the second keyframe. I'm going to set both of these to 50. We can always see how this looks and go back and adjust it. Right now we have it going down and then going back up. It's going to go all the way down to below the baseline and then all the way back up. But if I wanted this to be a little bit more fluid looking, what we need to do is move these keyframes to the left. I'm going to look just at that first letter at the B, and let's look at when it reaches all the way to its lowest point. It looks like it's about somewhere around here. I'm going to take these keyframes and drag them both to start right here. This way, as soon as the first letter reaches the lowest point, it's going to start animating backup because of these keyframes. Let's play that back. That's looking pretty good. Let's add our next animator. I'm just going to close this up, I'm going to be a little bit lazy here and just duplicate this animator instead of creating a new one. I'm just going to select it and Hit Command D, and then let's hit Enter and rename this. Let's call it up. This is when it's going to bounce back up. The first thing that I need to do is just take these key frames on this up layer and move them all the way over so I can see what I'm doing. I haven't changed the position value of this yet since I duplicated it, so it's making it go all the way down here again. But I want it to go up, so let's just adjust this value so it's going to go above the baseline. Maybe something like negative 50. Now if we just scrub through this, it's going to go all the way down, bounce back up, and then as these third set of keyframes animates, it's going to land back on the baseline. Again, like I did with the second text animator, I'm going to go and see when that B is reaching its highest point, maybe somewhere around here, and I'm going to drag those keyframes to start at that point. Now let's play this back. That looks pretty good. I think it could go a little bit faster overall. What I'm going to do is just Hit U on the keyboard. Then if you want to stretch or shrink the distance between all of your keyframes at once to either speed up or slow down your animation, what you can do is just select all the keyframes and then holding down option or on a PC alt, then you want to take your last keyframe and just drag it. I'm just going to drag it to the left to make all of these keyframes closer together to speed up my animation. Now if we play this back, I have a faster animation. If you wanted to make your animation slower, you could just drag to the right to spread out those keyframes. That's one example of how you can use multiple texts animators to create a more complex animation. 8. Animate Out: Now let's look at how we can animate this text off. To do that, I'm going to create a new text animator on this layer. So I'm going to select where it says text, go to the anime button, and then add another text animator for the position. And then with my playhead over here, let's just choose 3 seconds. I'm going to have the position go back up. So let's just set this back to, like, negative 200. And let's go in and animate the range selector. So I'm going to animate this from negative 100. And we'll go 20 frames forward in time and make this 100. I want to bring my playhead back over here. Because I haven't changed the selector shape, this is set to the default square selector, it's actually going to animate up and then back down. What I need to do is go into the advanced options on the rain selector and change the shape. For this, I'm going to want to use ramp down. That way, it'll start from here and then go back up like that, the opposite of the way it came in. If you weren't sure what selector shape you were going to need, you could always just guess and check because it's easy to undo things. But you could also go back into this visual reference that I've given you to look at the different selector shapes. You can see that ramp down has the text starting at its default position. The text animator at negative 100% in the offset is going to be all the way off like this and the text will just be the default value. Then as it moves from negative 100% offset to 100% offset, it's going to apply that text animator to the text, which is exactly what we want when we're animating something out. So I'm just going to go back into my example, and I've chosen ramp down and so you can see that this is going to animate the letters back off like that. I'm also going to adjust the easing here. So I want this to go slow at the beginning and then quicker as it reaches its final state up here. That option is going to be Es low. I'm going to set that to 100%. And also, if you couldn't remember if you wanted Es low or Es high, you can always just try them, or you can go and look at this visual reference that I've given you to see which one you need. So back in this example, let's just play back what we have. So that's looking good. Let's add another property to this bouncy so that it actually fully disappears when it animates out. So to do that, I'm going to go to this animator one, which I should really rename. So I'm going to hit Enter and rename this animate out. And then I'm going to go to the Add button and add a opacity property. And let's just set that to 0%. Now we can hit you just see all those keyframes and let's play back the whole thing. So that's how you can animate your text out with text animators. 9. Example: Stroke & Fill: In this example, I'm going to have a version of the letters, that's just the stroke animated in. And then have the letters be filled in with the fill color. First, we need to make sure that our text has a fill and a stroke with the layer selected. If you go over to the character panel, you want to make sure that you have the stroke color with this box and the fill color with this box. If I turn off the fill, you can see that I have this stroke here. And the way that you adjust the width is right here. I'm going to undo that to get my fill back. And now let's animate this first. Just toggle down the layer. I'm going to go to animate and then fill color. And let's just animate the opacity first, I need to set the fill opacity to zero. And then toggle down the range selector. Let's just animate this, 0-100 Now you can see that all of those are getting filled in. Right now it's fading in the color. It takes a couple of frames for the fill color to come in. But if you wanted this to come in just like all at once, instead of fading up the color, you could go underneath advanced and then change the smoothness to 0% The smoothness value is for when you have the shape selector set to square. It's going to determine how smooth the transition from the letter complete unselected to completely selected, or vice versa, is. When you have smoothness at 100% it's going to be really smooth. It's going to take a little bit for that transition to happen. When you set the smoothness down to zero, it's going to be instant. Now if we play this back, you can see that those are just filled in all the way. There's no fading in each letter. You can do this however you want. Up to personal preference, I'm just going to set this back to 100 so it fades in. Then let's just name this animator, Phil. Let's create another animator. This time we want to animate the stroke color. And then let's just add opacity to that. We'll set that down to zero. Toggle down the range selector, and then let's animate the offset from 0% to 100% Let's just name the second animator stroke then. I'm just going to hit you on the keyboard with this layer selected to bring up both sets of keyframes. We can't see the labels of which is which, but I know that Phil is on top and stroke is on bottom. I want the stroke to come in first. So I'm going to have these keyframes start at zero and then let's just slide the Phil keyframes over a few frames to the right. To animate this out. We can actually just use these same animators and hold keyframe. Let me show you what I mean. I want this to animate out from left to right. So what I'm going to need to do is animate this from negative 100 to zero. That's going to animate the fill off. And then we can do the same thing with the stroke. The problem that we have now is that this is animating in the middle of this, where I want nothing to be happening. What we need to do is convert these keyframes to hold key frames. I'm just going to right click on one of them and do toggle hold keyframe that'll make these into hold keyframes. So it's just going to maintain this same value until it meets another key frame. That way nothing will happen in the middle here. Then once it gets to here, it'll start animating off in the opposite direction on the animation out. I want the fill color to animate out. First let's just take these two key frames on the bottom. These are for the stroke. And just move these over to the right a couple frames. Now let's see what we have. 10. Example: Flicker: In this example, we're going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to show you how you can use one of after-effects built-in default animation presets to animate the text in, but then we're going to customize it. I mentioned before that a lot of the default animation presets aren't that great, but there are a few that aren't so bad and you can add things to them to make them more interesting. Let's take a look. First, makes sure that the layer is selected and that your play head is wherever you want the animation to start. And then just go over into the Effects and Presets panel. If you don't see this panel, just go up to Window, and then you'll find it right here. You can search for Flicker in the search bar here, or you can toggle down like this to get to it. Then what you want to do is just double-click on this effect to apply it to your layer. You can see right away that it's added text animators by these bars and the fact that the text is gone. If you hit "Play", you'll see what it does. If you hit "U" on the keyboard, you can see all the keyframes that the preset has added to animate this text. You can see that there's a text animator because they're using a range selector to animate this, and then they're also just animating the opacity with some hold keyframes for this flickering effect right here. I actually wanted to just come in and flicker like this, but I don't need this whole flicker going on right here. What I'm going to do is just delete all of these keyframes. I just want the animation to animate in. But let's see how we can make this a little bit more interesting. I'm going to toggle this up and then back down to get into the text animator. There is just one text animator that's called Flicker In. Mostly we've been animating the offset, but in this case, the start value is animated, which is going to work totally fine. We don't necessarily need to change that. Then you can see underneath Advanced that the selector shape is set to square and it's just animating characters. Then something that we haven't used yet that's utilized in this example is that we're randomizing the order of this. If I turn Randomize Order off, it'll just animate in from left to right. But if you turn Randomize Order on, it will animate in characters in a random order. You can also change the Random Seed here. If say you didn't like that, the K came in first, you could put in a different number for the Random Seed and it will re-choose the Randomized Order. You can adjust this number until you're happy with the random order that it chooses for you. I'm going to just close up advance, and let's add a scale to this. I'm going to go to this Add button next to the Flicker In Animator, go to Property, and then choose Scale. At the same time as the letters are fading up, let's also have them scale from, let's do 150. It's now if we play this back. It makes it just a little bit more interesting. The letters are starting out big and then as they fade in and they're also scaling down a bit. If you wanted the letters to scale from the center instead of the bottom, if you go into More Options, you can adjust the Grouping Alignment. Remember these little red x's show the anchor point for each letter. I'm going to adjust this y-value to bring those little anchors up. Now, the letters will scale from the center. Next, I'm going to close up this layer, and let's create another version of this to create a different color that comes in first. I'm just going to hit "Command D" with the layer selected to duplicate this layer. Then let's go over into the Character Panel and choose a different color. I'm going to click on the "Fill Color" here and then just paste in the hex code that I've copied. Actually, I want the final look of the text to be black. I'm going to bring this layer up above the blue one. Then let's make this black layer come in a little bit after the blue one. It's going to have all the same animation because I just duplicated the layer, but now you can see that that flicker is happening with the blue first, and then the black comes on top of it. Now that I see this, I don't really like how the black is fading over the blue and it overlaps like this, like right here on the R. I think that looks a little bit messy. What I'm going to do is go into this top black layer and just toggle it down until I find that scale property underneath the Flicker In text animator, and I'm just going to delete the scale. Now the black layer is not going to scale, but the blue layer will. I think this looks a lot cleaner. When you have two different layers to make up your text animation, there's a few things that are a good idea to do. The first one is just to pick which one's going to be the master layer and then have the other layer parented to that master layer. That way, if you move the master layer, the other layer will go with it and the text animation will still work. Another thing that you can do is parent the source texts. If you toggle down into the layer right underneath text, you'll see source texts. What we need to do is parent the source text of the secondary layer or the little accent one, the blue one in this case, to the source text on our master layer. You just take that pick whip and drag from here to here like this. Now if I go in and change what it says, then both layers are changing and the text animation still works. If you decide that you want to change any of the aspects of the texts that are in this Character Panel, you're going to have to select both layers of text and then make those changes over here. You could make this bigger, make it bold. As long as you have both of those text layers selected, then it will adjust both of them, and your animation will still work. Later in the class, I'm going to show you how you can save a text animation as a preset, but one thing that I should know about an animation like this that has two different layers is that you're not going to be able to save this whole thing as a preset because you have two layers. You can only save something as a preset if it's just on a single layer. But hopefully, this example showed you how you can use the default text animators, edit them and customize them how you like them. Also, another thing that you can do with text animators in general, no matter how you started out creating them, is that you can duplicate them to have an offset, a different colored animation. 11. Example: Blur + Tracking: In this example, I'm going to show you how to animate the tracking property, which is the space between letters. Whereas most of our texts animations have happened from left to right, we're going to make this one happen from the center outwards. We're also going to animate the blur and opacity of this text. Over in the character panel for this text, you can see that I've already added tracking here. There's already some extra space between the letters, but we're going to animate additional space. These letters are really spaced out and then the final look will be this. The tracking that you have here is completely independent from any tracking menu animator with the text animator. You can have this be zero or any number, it doesn't matter. Now let's toggle down the layer and hit the animate button, and add tracking. If you adjust the tracking amount, you can see that this is adding additional space between your letters. The way that this is adjusting the space between letters is acting as if the anchor point is over on the left. But I want this to happen from the center. What I'm going to do is make sure that this text is selected and go into the Paragraph panel. Then instead of having it be left aligned, I'm going to have be centered. Now it's going to move the texts, but I can just use the Align Panel to make that centered in my composition again. I'm going to set the tracking amount to, let's do 75. Now let's animate this with the range selector. Because I want this to animate from the center outwards, I'm actually going to need two different animators that'll have each a range selector. That way I can animate one for the left half of the text, and one for the right half of the text to make it look like it's animating from the center outwards. First, let's set up the left side. I'm going to select where it says animator 1 and just name this left. If you were planning on using the shape selector of square, you could just animate the start or end values to make this work. But I'm actually going to want to make this a little bit more fluid looking so that the animation on each character can overlap a bit more. To do that, I'm going to use ramp up and ramp down. For the left side we're going to use ramp down. Now I'm going to change the Range selectors and value to be 50%. That way, the selector is only covering the left half of the text. Now I can animate the offset value to animate this text selector moving over the texts and creating our text animation. If I bring the offset value to 50%, then you can see that the left half of the text is spaced out with this tracking amount of 75. In other words, the selector is applying the tracking amount that we've set here to the left half of our text. Now I can animate from 50. Let's go to about two seconds, and animate this all the way to negative 100. That's pushing the selector all the way off to the left so that those letters on the left are decreasing their spacing, starting from the inside and moving outwards. Now that we've got the left side of the text setup, let's duplicate this to create the right side. I'm just going to hit command D, and let's rename this right. Right now this is messing up the texts, but we're going to go in and adjust what we need to fix this. Underneath the Range Selector and then advanced, we need to change the shape to ramp up. Next we need to change the start value to be at 50%. This will be starting here, and then the end will be at 100% so that this is just selecting the right half of our texts. You may not be able to see the start and end bars for your texts, not just because we have multiple range selectors, but this is how you want it to look. Then for the offset, we need to animate this and basically the inverse way, so it's going to be negative 50, and then the second keyframe will be positive 100. Now let's play this back. Now that we've got this setup, let's add the blur property. I'm just going to go to the left animator and hit the add button, and then go over to property and then blur. Let's make this blurred about, let's see, like maybe 30. Then because we've added this to an existing animator that already had keyframes on it, the blur will animate itself out. I'm also going to add opacity. Just go to add property, and then Opacity and set this to zero. Now it's going to fade in and blur and adjust the tracking to animated. But obviously that's only happening to the left side let's just copy the Opacity and blur by just holding Command or Control and clicking both of those. Then Command or Control C to copy. Then I'm going to close up the left animator and open up the right animator and just hit Command V with right selected there and it will paste in those two properties. Now if we play this back, it will have everything happening on both sides. 12. Example: Helix Twist: In this example, we'll look at a use case on this smooth select your shape, and we'll look at the 3D property. To make this texts look like it's twisting like a DNA strand or helix, the first thing I need to do is go down into the layer and then click the "Animate" button and enable per-character 3D. This is going to bring up some new options, but we're actually not going to use those in this example. The next thing I want to do is just add another animator. I'm going to add a rotation animator, and so that'll bring up x, y, and z rotation. I'm only going to rotate in the x-direction. I could actually just delete these y and z rotations just to clean up my timeline. If I rotate this right now, you can see that it's rotating from the bottom where these little xs are, that mark the anchor point for each character. What I want to do is go up to more options, and then under grouping alignment, I just want to bring up this y percentage, so it's more in the middle of the characters. Something like that looks pretty good. Now when I rotate the x rotation, it'll rotate more from the middle of the layer. I want to have these letters to a complete flip, so I'm going to set the x rotation to one, and this is just setting one revolution. Since I don't want to just have all of the characters feel about once. Instead of animating the x rotation, I need to animate the range selector. I want each of these letters to do a complete flip, but the starting and ending position of this text is just the same look, how we have it right now. One way to do this is to change the selector shape to something that will animate all the way through and have the same look at both ends. If we go back into our select your shape reference, you can see that triangle round, smooth and even square. They all animate from -100 to 100 having the same look at both ends of the animation. But I want this to look really smooth, like it's twisting. That's where the smooth shape selector is going to come in handy. If I go back into my text animation, let's change the shape selector to smooth, and then let's keyframe the offset. Starting at -100, then let's just go one second and make this 100. I'm just going to set my work area to two seconds, and then let's play this back. That's looking a little bit faster than I was wanting it, so maybe if we just bring down the excitation, instead of doing one full revolution, we could just do -90, and then that way it'll just do a half flip, but it will still read the same way. It's just half the amount of rotation, but it still works. This is getting more of that helix look that I was going for. Now we have this animating with the helix twist, but let's have it also animate in. To do that, I'm just going to first rename this animator twist, so I know what it is, and then I'm going to need a different shape selector for the animation in so that it actually animates in. Let's just twirl this, twist up and then we can actually twirl more options up, and then I'm just going to select right here where it says text, and add new animator. Let's go and animate the scale of this. I'm going to name this animator Animate In. Let's set the scale to zero. Then in the range selector, i'm first going to go under advanced and change the selector shape to ramp up. Ramp up is usually good for animating things on. But now we need to set the offset to -100 and keyframe this. We can make the animation in a little bit shorter than the twist, but you can just go by whatever looks good to you. You can always adjust that obviously, wants to bring that up to 100. Now they'll scale in while they're twisting. It looks like I only got the offset to 99%, so let's just fix that. Then you could also adjust the easing. I'm just going to make ease high and ease low both 33%. If you wanted this to animate out and you want it to animate out like the opposite direction that it came in, so from right to left, all you would have to do is copy both of these sets of keyframes, Command C, Command V, and then right-click on one of them, go to keyframe assistant and then time-reverse keyframes. Now you can see it's going to come in, and then it's going to animate out basically the same way. We actually need to align these keyframes so that they're mirror image, so that this last keyframe and this last keyframe are aligned. If you didn't like it animating out from right to left, instead of just copying and pasting keyframes and time reversing those, you can create a new animator. Let's just do that. I'm going to close up some layers so we have more space. Instead of creating a new animator with this button, i'm just going to duplicate the animate in. I'll just hit Command D, and then let's name this Animate Out. Then the first thing I'm going to do is change the selector shape from Ramp Up to Ramp Down. If you go back into their reference, this makes sense because ramp down starts with the texts looking like it's final state, and then as it animates from -100 to 100, it applies that text animator property. If we change this to ramp down and move these keyframes over, so let's set this animation at two seconds. Now these will start scaling and fading out from the beginning of the text on the left. If we want to do that twist again, all we need to do is go back in to the twist, if you want to have it animating from right to left, you could animate from 100 to -100, but if you want it to go in the same direction as the text is animating up, then we need to get this back to -100. If I just set a keyframe for -100 like this, then we're going to have an additional twist in-between here. What I'm going to do is set this keyframe to a hold keyframe. To do that, just right-click and go to hold keyframe. What this says just holds this 100% value until it reaches the next keyframe. It holds the value until it meets another keyframe. Now we have a keyframe for -100, and then let's just keyframe this back to 100. Let's see what we have. If we just collapse this by hitting U on the keyboard to see the keyframes, what we need to do is just bring these keyframes over and then the twists will start happening, and then they'll start animating out. Here's our helix twist example. 13. Example: Slot Machine: In this example, I want to use multiple layers with a very similar text animation to make a slot machine-like effect. I'll just start with the first layer. I'm going to go into the layer, go to animate, and then enable per-character 3D. This way I can have the texts look like it's rotating in a spinning wheel thing, like a slot machine. I'm going to now go back to the Animate button and add a rotation animator. I'm only going to be animating the X rotation so I can delete the Y and Z rotations to clean up the timeline. Right now, when I rotate this, it's going to be rotating from the bottom where these little x's are to represent the anchor points. The first thing that I want to do is go up to more options. Under grouping alignment, I want to bring those little x's for the anchor point for each character up to maybe say negative 40 percent, so they're more in the middle of the layer like this. Now let's set the rotation. I want to animate this looking like it's coming in from the top. I'm thinking negative 90 is going to look good. Let's also add a position so it's coming down as it rotates. Next to animator 1, I'm going to hit the Add button, go to property, and then position. Let's change the y position of this to negative 200. Now that we've got these two properties set up, let's animate the range selector. I'm going to keep this on square with 100 percent smoothness. I'm going to animate from 0-100. This will bring down each letter. I don't like how we can see them rotated up here. Let's add an opacity. Next to animator 1, let's click "Add", "Property", and then "Opacity". Let's set that to zero. Now these will also fade in as they're rotating and moving down. Let's just name this top down so we know what this animator is doing. Now, a slot machine, if it was a spinning wheel, these letters would animate down. Next, I'm going to click on "Text", go to animate to make a new animator, and let's also animate the position. Then next to that animator click, "Add" and grab the rotation. Again, I can delete the Y and Z rotations because I'm not going to need those. Then let's name this animator. Let's call it center down. Now making sure that my play head is to the right of the first two keyframes, let's set up the position and exploitation. For this, I'm going to rotate it positive 90, so that it's rotating in the other direction as it was before, and then let's animate this in the other direction for the position so that'd be 200. Let's also add an opacity so that we don't see this weird flat-looking text down here. Property opacity and set this to zero. Now let's animate the range selector. I'm going to move my play head to the second keyframe on the first animator. Now for this, we need to animate the offset from negative 100 percent, so it puts all of those letters back where they were. Then moving the play head over to two seconds, I'm going to set another keyframe for this to be at zero. What these keyframes are essentially doing is making it so that these properties are not applied at this point because it's at negative 100. This is a square selector, then it's animating so that at two seconds, all of these properties are now applied to the text because this is at zero. Let's look at what we have so far. All the letters animate in, and then once they're all there, they all animate out. But I want this to be more like a slot machine so the letters continue. What we need to do is just offset these keyframes so that they're a little bit more to the left. What I'm going to do is scrub through the timeline and look for when that S stopped moving from the first animator. When it's in that center position. It looks like that's about here. I can take the second set of keyframes, the ones that are on the second animator, and drag those over to the left so that they start right where that first letter stops moving. Now if I play this back, it looks like they're just rolling through. We've got one of the layers set up and we need to create additional layers that we can have additional letters coming through. Then our final word is going to say slot machine, so we'll also need to set that up. To create another layer that's a version of this layer, I'm just going to hit command D to duplicate this layer. I'm going to rename one of these layers so that we know which one's going to be the final look of our animation. I'll just add final to this one. If I change my mind about what the text says, I want to just be able to change it on one layer instead of having to change it on multiple different layers. To make this work, I'm going to toggle down each layer until I can see source texts. On this duplicated layer, I'm going to take the source texts and use the pick whip to parent it to this source text. That way, if I change this text, then it will also change this text. Now we can close up these layers. Both of these layers have the exact same animation at the exact same time. So in order to get that slot machine look, I'm just going to drag the final slot machine layer a few frames to the right so that the letters aren't crashing and they're coming in one after another like this. Depending on what font you're using, you might have letters that crash into each other. A few things that you can do for this is to use a font where all the letters are a similar size width-wise, or you could add space between your letters, which is called tracking. In the character panel, you can see I've added some tracking right here. This just spaces out your letters. If you're adding tracking, make sure that you're doing on both layers. Let's go into the slot machine 2 layer and change the text so it doesn't just say slot machine that way we don't have multiple letters that are the same litter lined up like this but will make it look a bit more realistic like a real slot machine. I'm not actually going to change the texts myself, I'm going to let the text animator do that for me. I'm going to toggle down and then go to the animated button and down to character offset. This is going to add it on a new animator, which is exactly what I wanted. Let's rename this animator. Then let's change the character offset. If you enter a number in here, this is going to offset the character like one letter in the alphabet if you put in a one, so the I just turned into a J. You can put in any number you want for this and it will just be offset that many letters from what your text actually says. I'm just going to leave mine at one. Another thing that you might want to adjust is the character alignment for this font left or top works fine, but for other fonts, you might find the adjust kerning works better. Try all these different options if your letters are crashing. That's all I need to do here. I don't need to animate this because I don't need the letters to be changing, I just want them to be something different than the original layer. I can close this layer up and then make sure it's fully selected and hit command D to duplicate it and then we'll take these two layers and move them so that we have three versions of letters coming in. Now let's go into this slot machine 3 and go into the text and then the character offset and let's just change this character offset. I'll just put in two, so now this is going to be a different letter. Now we have three different letters coming in. Our slot machine is also animating out. Even though that's the last letter to come in, it also animates out. We need to do now is go back into the slot machine final and the center or down text animator, we need to move these keyframes over and we can maybe even delete them if you don't want it to animate out at all. Now it's going to animate in and the final texts will say slot machine. Then it will just animate out with those keyframes wherever you decide to put them. Or you could delete them and have it animate out in a different way. Now the nice thing about this in the way that I set it up is that if I wanted to change my text, I can change it and the slot machine effect will still work because I parented that text. Now also notice I just wrote texts in lowercase, and so I'm getting lowercase letters in here. In order to get the all caps, even though this button is turned on to have all caps, you need to actually write your texts in all caps for this to work. Now you can see that these are all caps. 14. Example: Pop Up: In this example we'll use a different type of selector called a wiggle selector, but first let's set up an animation where this texts pops up, overshoots, and then comes back down. I'm going to toggle down the layer, go to Animate and choose Position. Let's name this position down, and then I'm going to bring the position value down to, let's do, 200. Then I'm going to toggle down the range selector. We're not going to be using the wiggle expression on this animator. Then I'm going to go down into Advanced and change this to Ramp Up. Then let's animate this from negative 100 to 100. Now the text is moving up. Let's also adjust the easing. For ease low, I'm going to set this to 100%. This way as it animates in, it's going to start off fast and then slow down as it reaches its final position. Now let's create the overshoot animation. I'm just going to collapse the position animator and then duplicate it by hitting Command or Control D. Then let's rename this up. Then I'm going to need to go in and change the position. But if I do it right now, I can't really see what's happening because these keyframes are lined up. I'm just going to toggle down, bring these keyframes over, and then put my playhead in-between them. Now if I adjust the position, I can actually see what's going on. Let's make this negative 50. Now this is going to pop up and then go down, but I'm actually going to want this to happen a little bit more overlapping. I'm going to take these keyframes on the position up animator and I'm going to drag them over to the start. They're actually aligned with the position down. Right now you can't really see anything happening. It just comes up, but it doesn't come back down because these things are happening at the exact same time. But if we go into the advanced toggle and then change the ease low back to zero, and then change the ease high to 100, now the position up animator has the opposite easing as the position down. This is going to create a nice smooth animation where it's going to start quickly moving up and then slow down, and then it's going to move from the top, down, moving slow, and then fast. It looks like this. Now that we've got the main animation setup, let's add a rotation to give this a little bit more of a playful look. I'm going to create a new animator for the rotation property. This is where we're going to use the wiggly selector. I'm just going to rename this animator, wiggly rotation, and then let's actually add the wiggly selector. I'm just going to hit the Add button next to the animator and choose Selector and then Wiggly. This is going to add another selector in addition to the range selector. If you toggle down the wiggly selector, there's a bunch of different properties that are different from the ones that you have with a range selector. If we give this a rotation value, you'll see that it already has an effect on the text. It will just randomly wiggle that rotation value. Then even after the position animators are done animating, it's just going to continue to wiggle those letters. It's going to be wiggling anywhere between negative 25 and 25. You can tell that because the maximum is going to be 100% of whatever rotation you put in here, and then the minima is going to be negative 100% of whatever you put in here. Then there's going to be two wiggles every second. Then all the rest of these things, I'll let you just explore and try different values and see what happens because we're not going to need those in this example. What I want to happen is that it's going to randomly wiggle as it moves up, but then as the position animation finishes, I want it to stop wiggling. What I'm going to do is actually close up the wiggle selector and animate the range selector. By animating the range selector, I'm going to affect when the wiggly selector is actually able to affect the text. First, I'm going to go under the Range Selector, under Advanced and change this to Ramp Up. While we're at it, let's also adjust the easing. Maybe we'll just do 50% on each ease high and ease low. Now I can animate the range selector here to go from negative 100 to 100. Now let's play this back. You can see that this is a really subtle effect, but it's just having a slight rotation on each letter as it pops up. But then as it moves into place, it's settling into a non rotated state. We can also move these keyframes to the right just a little bit. It takes a couple of extra frames to settle into place as a non rotated letter. That's just one example of how you can use a wiggly selector. Another thing that you could do with an example like this is use masks. Obviously my text isn't really animating in because we can already see it down here. You could just add an opacity, but I'm going to do something different in this example. I'm going to create an underline for this text. I'm just going to move my play-head to where the text is already animated in, and then let's just grab the pen tool. First I'm going to change the fill so that we'd have no fill. We're just creating a line. I'll make the stroke like 20. Then making sure that the text layer is not selected, I'm just going to click to create a point, hold down Shift and then click to create another point over here. That will create a line like this. I'm going to rename this layer by hitting Enter, and then let's toggle down the layer and underneath contents Shape 1 and then stroke. I'm going to change the line cap to round caps. I'll just make the ends of the line rounded. Now we can close this back up. What I want to happen is I want the text to not be visible when it's below this line. It looks like I actually need to move the line up just a little bit so that none of the letters are poking up above the line. It'll animate up and they'll just sit right on that line. What I need to do is create a matte so that the letters are not visible when they're below the line. To do that, I'm just going to grab the shape tool and make sure that we have a fill and we don't need the stroke. Then again, making sure that no layers are selected, I'm going to click and drag with the shape tool to create a rectangle. Now we need to set the matte for this text layer to be the rectangle. In order to see the matte options, you want to click this toggle Switches/Modes button here. We're looking for the Track Matte option. There's a couple of ways to set the Track Matte. You can use the drop-down menu to select the shape that you want to be the matte or you could use the pick whip like this. It's going to automatically turn off the eyeball on that layer. This is exactly what we want because now the text is only visible within the area of this rectangle of the map. I'm just going to rename this Matte just so I know what it is. That's our pop up example. 15. Example: Bounce + Echo: For this example, I'll walk you through how I created this bounty text complete with squash and stretch. Then we'll add an echo effect to make this smear look. The idea behind how I animated this is similar to other examples I've shown you. Let's just look at what animators I have in order. First is opacity, and this is just having each letter come in one at a time. If I toggle this open, the opacity is set to zero. But the reason that this is not fitting in each letter, it just has each letter pop in, is because in the range selector underneath advanced, I have the shape set to square, then I've turned the smoothness all the way down to zero. If I turn the smoothness all the way up, you can see that now the letters will fade one at a time, but if I turn this smoothness all the way down to zero, then they just pop in one at a time. Next, I have an animator to animate this from up here down to here. There is a position property and I'm also animating the scale. The first one is going to be really squashed and also a little bit smaller than the final scale so that it just looks like it's coming towards us or something. The next to animator is going to be for the bounce back up. After it animates down, it's going to bounce back up, and it's going to actually overshoot past the final resting point and then it'll come back down. That's this one. Notice that on this down, up, and then down, I first start the scale a little bit smaller, and then on this up animator, the scale is a little bit wider because this is when it actually lands on the ground, and so it's squashing vertically. Then as it comes back up, it's going to squash horizontally so that's when it's going to be a little bit narrower and then taller. Let's actually look at the key frames for these things. The first one is the opacity. Opacity is also lined up with the down animation. Then as soon as that B reaches its lowest point, that's when I start the key frames right here for the up animation, so that way the B comes right down and then pops right back up. Then the same will happen for all the other letters. Then again, same idea as the B reaches its final up position right here, then these key frames on this down position, for it to go back down to its final position, come in. I'm going to close these all back up and let's look at the rotation that I have here. Just like another example that you saw, I'm using a wiggly selector to apply at 25 degree of rotation randomly to these letters. That's what the wiggly selector is doing, it's just applying this random wiggle between negative 25 and 25 degrees. Then the range selector is animating that wiggle so that it's actually affecting the texts as the text is animating in. Once the text is all the way animated in, these key frames on the range selector make the wiggle selector stop effecting the texts. This is the text animation that I have so far. Let's add the additional color that smears behind this text. I'm just going to close up the layer and let's go over to the Effects and Presets panel. I'm just going to search for echo. This is the effect that I want. With the text layer selected, I'm just going to double-click this echo effect, and in the effect controls panel, you'll see that you have this new echo effect. If you don't see your effect controls panel, go up to window, and you can find it down here. Let's see what this is done by default. It's added an echo or a smear look, but you can see little bits of edges where it's not a perfect smear. Especially here on the O, you would want this to be filled in. What we need to do is go up to the echo effect and make this echo time and even smaller number, so I'm going to make this negative 0.001. That's going to make the echo closer to the letter, but now it doesn't even look like if we have an echo. I need to increase the number of echoes. Let's try 50. Now we're getting that smear look. Now depending on how big or smaller your text is, you might need to use different numbers here, but this is what is looking pretty good for me. Now we have more of that smear look, but it's all one color. If we go over to effects and presets, we can add a fill. I'm going to apply this fill effect to the layer. You can either double-click at he layer selected or you can also just drag the effect onto the layer and then I'm going to go into the color and paste a hex number and now that's recolored, but this is re-coloring the entire layer. I want the face of these letters to be black so that the final look of this text is black and only the smear is blue. What we can do is use a different effect called CC composite. I'm just going to drag that onto my layer. That's going to make the face of the text black, but it's going to let the smear stay blue. The default settings are already what we want. If you want to change the color of the face of the text, so where I have black, you can just go to the Character panel and then change this color. Then of course, if you want to change the color of the smear, you would just change the color of the fill here. Here's what we have. Now one other minor thing that you can fix is that when you look closely at a letter like the B here, you can see that the connection between all of the different echoes with a different copies that it's creating, of the letter B, you can see this jaggedy edge right here, it's pixelated. We could add an effect to clean that up a bit. I'm going to go over to effects and presets and just search for choker. It's going to be the simple choker that we want, so I'll just apply that. We can just bring the choke matte number up to maybe just something like one, and it smooths that out just a little bit. 16. Example: 3D Text Flip: In this example, we're going to make texts 3D right inside of After Effects. We're going to animate it in flipping in three-dimensional space. To make this layer 3D, I'm going to hit this little 3D box right here. We also need to toggle down the layer and then change the render from classic 3D to Cinema 4D. Now, even if you don't have Cinema 4D on your computer if you have the Creative Cloud version of After Effects, then you also have Cinema 4D Lite. That's all you need for this to work. Now keep in mind that if you're using some of these things, they might not work if you don't have the full version of Cinema 4D. If you come across any weird problems, come back to this dialog box and check if its one of these things. But for our example, this isn't going to matter. Now you can toggle down geometry options and adjust these different properties. First, let's just adjust the extrusion depth. This is going to make this text not just flat. I'm going to set this to about 50. If you go up to the animate button, you'll see the front, bevel, side and back options. For these, there's a bunch of different things that you could change, but I'm just going to keep this simple and stick with colors. I'm going to go to the side, color and just choose RGB. Now you can see that extrusion depth is going to be this red color. I'm going to change this to gray. Let's actually change the face of our texts to something else. There's two ways that you could do this. You could go into the animate button and change the front color, or you could just change the color of your text. I'm going to go into the animate button and then add a bevel. Let's add a colored bevel. What is your RGB? Right now I can't really see the bevel, so I'm going to change the bevel style under "Geometry" options to convex. Now we can see that red outline. Let's just increase the bevel depth to 10. Let's change this color to be the same color as the side. Now let's animate this in. I realized that I've created two different animators for the different colors, and that's not really necessary. I'm going to select the bevel color, copy this, and go up to animator 1 and paste it. We can also delete the Range Selector on animator 1 and just delete animator 2 altogether. Now we just have the two colors underneath animator 1. I'm going to rename this colors. I don't plan on animating the colors, so this is all I need here. Now I'm going to go back to the animate button and let's add a rotation animation. Because this is 3D, you would probably expect the rotation to give you X, Y, and Z. But the reason it's not is because we need to go back to the animate button and enable per character 3D. Now we have X, Y, and Z rotations. I'm going to animate X the rotation. It'll flip like this. Let's just set the X rotation to one, so we'll do a full revolution. I'm also going to set the Y rotation to 90. It just does a little bit more of an interesting flip as it comes in. To animate this in, we're going to use the range selector. First I'm going to go into advanced and change the selector shape to ramp up. Now let's animate this from negative 100 to 100. Here's what we have so far. If you don't like how much the text is moving up and down as it animates in. You could go into more options and then adjust the grouping alignment to bring those little red X's into the center of the text. Because now we'll flip from the center of the text so there's less up and down motion going on. I actually liked it how it was, so I'm going to undo that. Another thing that would make this look nice is to adjust the easing. I'm just going to make the ease high and ease low both 50 percent. I'm also going to add a property to this animator so that it animates from completely not visible to completely visible. I'm going to add the scale property, and let's just set this to zero. Here's the final result. This is a little bit fast, so I'm just going to drag out this key frame to slow it down a bit. 17. Save Preset: In this video, I'll show you how to save your texts animators as a preset. This way, you can easily use this text animation on any other text layer across any After Effects project. Once you set this up, you won't even need to import anything to reuse it in another After Effects project. This will work with any texts animators as long as you just have a single layer. If you have effects like this, those can be part of the preset too. To save this as a preset, what you need to do is select where it says text and where it says effects if you have any effects, if you don't have any effects, just select where it says text. Then you want to go up to Effects and Presets, and click on this little hamburger menu. Then go down to Save Animation Preset. This Save Animation Preset window should pop up, but if it doesn't, that means that whatever you selected wasn't working out. By default, it'll probably have it set up to save in this User Presets folder. But I like to save it in my own folder because I don't know where this user presets folder is on my computer. If I wanted to share the preset with somebody else, I don't know where to find it. Obviously, there's probably a way to find it, but this is just how I like to do things. What I'm going to do is go to my Applications and then Adobe After Effects, and then Presets, and I want to make my own folder in here, but the New Folder button is grayed out. I'm going to go to Finder and find the same area, so After Effects, then Presets, then I'm just going to go in here and right-click and choose "New Folder". It's going to ask for your password. But now it'll create the new folder and I'm just going to name this my presets. Now if we go back into After Effects, that my presets folder is already there, and we can just name this. Then if you go into Animation Presets and toggle down under Presets, then My Presets, here's the bounce text with echo. I'm just going to create a new comp. When I save this preset, I selected texts and effects. This is going to save basically everything on this layer, so all the texts information including what the text says and the style of the text. If I go in to my blank composition and just double-click on this preset, it's going to create that exact same texts layer as my original composition. From here, I could always adjust things and I could change what the text says. You could also go in and adjust any of the effects if you have them or the texts animators, and it won't affect your original texts layer or the preset that you've saved. I'm going to show you one more example where we don't actually save what the text says or the style of text. This way, the preset can be applied to an existing layer of text without editing what the text says or the styling of the text, it will just add the text animators. What you need to do is select anything that you've adjusted that you want to be saved as part of the preset. For this example, I need to select the twist, the animate in and the animate out. Also, underneath more options, the grouping alignment was adjusted so that it animated from more of the center, so I'm going to select that too. Then I'm going to go into Effects and Presets, in the Hamburger menu, and then choose "Save Animation Preset". It might by default now put it in the same folder as you had it, otherwise navigate to where you want to save the preset and name it. Then just hit "Save". I'm going to go back into this composition, and now let's create a text layer. Now let's go into our Animation Presets, Presets, My Presets, and then let's add this helix twist text. I'm just going to move my playhead to the start of the timeline so that, that's where the preset is applied. That's where the keyframes are pasted, and now I'm just going to hide this other layer. Now you can see that in this example it just copied the animation presets without the styling or what the text said. If you have a preset file, a.ffx file that you've got from somebody else, maybe like me, and you want to install, what you need to do is drag this into your presets folder. I'm going to drag this into the folder that I created specifically for my own presets, which I just really creatively named my presets. Then once you go into After Effects, you don't need to restart or anything, all you need to do is go into Effects and Presets, and then toggle down and find wherever you saved that preset. If it doesn't just show up automatically, go to the Hamburger menu and then choose "Refresh List". Now you can apply the preset to your text. Also, keep in mind that for this effect, this was supposed to have a stroke and a fill being animated in. The stroke would come in first and then the fill, like the example that I showed you earlier. But that's not happening here because this text layer doesn't have a stroke. What I need to do is go into my Character panel, go to the Stroke property, give it a stroke, and now this preset is working as expected. If you ever change your mind and want to remove a text animator from a layer, you could just go in and delete the text animators from here. Or another thing you can do is just select the entire layer, go up to Animation, and then choose "Remove All Text Animators", and that'll essentially reset your text. 18. What's Next: If you haven't already, now's the time to use everything you've learned about text animators to create your own text animation. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the discussions tab below this video. For your class project, just render out a video or GIF of your text animation. You're more than welcome to do more than one if you like. There are instructions below this video, if you need help rendering your project as a video or GIF file and uploading it as a class project. If there's anything in particular that you want feedback on, include a note to let me know. If you enjoyed this class, I would really appreciate it if you left a review. As a teacher, this helps me to create more quality classes for you. To keep learning click on my name next to this video to check out the other classes that I'm teaching. To learn more about text animation, check out these classes. Make sure you're following me here on Skillshare and also sign up for my email newsletter to hear when I have a new class for you. The newsletter is monthly and I also send After Effects tutorials, tips, and random recommendations. Thanks so much for being here and until next time, happy animating.