• After Effects Writing Animation

Creating a handwriting effect in After Effects is easier than you think. You can use a simple handwriting animation template and customise it to get the exact result you're looking for. Video production expert Dave Bode walks you through the whole process in this detailed half-hour video tutorial.

10 Free After Effects Text Presets - Hello! Download these free presets to have some great text animations that are ready to go on your next video or motion graphics project. The key word here is free! That is not a typo. Just signup to a free account and start using these fantastic title. Apply an effect called “stroke”. In the effects and presets panel, select an effect from the “generate” folder called “stroke.” Drag it to the text layer you created in Step One. (You can learn more about stroke, and the other generate effects, by checking this handy guide.) Type “stroke” into the search bar to. FOLLOW ME Instagram: super-easy way to write-on text in Adobe After Effects CC 2017Font: http://www.dafont.com/run-w.

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.

After Effects Writing Animation

How do you use expressions in After Effects? Do you have any favorites? Leave acomment or let me know on twitter.