Jun 23, 2019 Creating animated text using your own handwriting may seem daunting at first, but is actually pretty straightforward to make a write-on effect in After Effects. Add some personality to the titles in your videos with this stylish, authentic title effect, which can be overlaid on footage to create a beautifully textured result. The write-on animation effect is a familiar one to most motion graphics artists. But making your animated flowing type appear seamless can be tricky. In this course, instructor Ran Ben Avraham provides a fresh take on this popular effect, sharing techniques that can help you take it several levels forward in Adobe After Effects.
After Effects (AE) is a great tool for prototyping UI animations, but we’re alwayslooking for ways to speed up our workflow. AE comes with support forexpressions, which create relationships between layer properties or keyframes sothe designer can animate layers without defining each keyframe by hand. We’ll gothrough some basics of using and defining expressions, as well as how to modifythem to best suit your needs. We havea great primer on AEif you want to become more familiar with the terms and tools before jumping intoexpressions.
So, what is an expression
Expressions will look pretty familiar to most of the readers that frequent theGiant Robots blog. They’re very similar to scripts you would use on the web, butrather than acting on the application itself, they define how a property should behave.Adobe based their expression language on JavaScript, so writing and editing thecode should also feel very familiar. Expressions are by no means a requirement forprototyping animations, but I’ve found them very helpful when trying to recreateeffects like inertia or bouncing without specifying a bunch of additionalkeyframes.
Lots of expressions exist already, and have for years, but they aren’t alwayseasy to find if you aren’t sure what you’re looking for. Dan Ebberts has done agreat job explaining expressions and how to use them effectively, laying theground work for what we’ll be going over today. His site,motionscript.com, has a lot of additional resourcesfor those that want to dive even deeper into AE.
We’ll be working with a popular inertia expression today. It works by pluggingvariables for amplitude, frequency, and decay into a sine function thatovershoots its target and “settles” on the final value. All you’ll need to do iscopy and paste the following in the right place and edit the variables to changethe look and feel of the animation.
Adding expressions in After Effects
I’ve set up a simple two-keyframe animation where the position is animated,similar to those in ourAccessible After Effects post.Once you’ve created your keyframes, it’s very simple to add an expression. First,right-click on the final keyframe, open the Keyframe Assistant menu, and chooseEasy Ease Out. This last step is optional, but specifying Easy Ease Out willslow the animation down towards the end, which works well with the inertiaexpression we’re working with.
Next, hold ‘alt’ and left click the stop watch icon next to “Position”. Thisshould enable expressions on this layer and open a textarea-style field whereyou’ll put the expression.
Go ahead and copy and paste the above script, replacing what’s already in theexpression input. Playing the animation should look something like the following:
Feel free to add motion blur at this point, too. It’s a toggle on each layer,just click the box below the motion blur icon to enable it for that layer. Itsimply smoothes out the animation and makes it look less jarring.
Now you’re free to jump into the code to change how your animation looks. Belowis a reference for what changing the different variables will do to youranimation, with the other variables left the same.
As you can see, you can add a lot of life to your animations with just twokeyframes and an expression. We also only animated the position property here,but you can add this same expression to other properties as well. With just afew additional keyframes and a few tweaks to the variables for each property,the animation really begins to come to life.
How do you use expressions in After Effects? Do you have any favorites? Leave acomment or let me know on twitter.
- Compatible with Adobe After Effects, versions CS3 and all later versions (including Creative Cloud). Works on both Mac or PC. No third-party plugins required.
- Some animation work (keyframing) is required to create final typewriter animations as shown in the preview. The video tutorial takes you through the process step-by-step. In the video, a typing animation is created from beginning to end. The project is explained in detail along the way. There's no limit to how much text you can have in your custom typewriter animation, but expect to put in about three minutes of work per word, once you watch the video and understand how it works.
- Comps are HD, 1920x1080.
How To Do Writing Effect In After Effects
TheTypewriter Effect template is not a plugin. It's an Adobe After Effects project file, commonly known as a 'template' because the work is already done and the user needs only to make their own adjustments. This template is compatible with version CS3 as well as all later versions of After Effects.
The Typewriter Effect template contains copyrighted intellectual property. The sharing or online posting of project files with or for anyone other than a client is prohibited. See the Terms and Conditions for more details.
Writing Effect After Effects For Images
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