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Filed under: Motion Graphics •

Animating Text in Apple’s Motion

The Glow and Drop Shadow sections (left). Since each of the Outline, Glow and Drop Shadow offers gradient fills and blur, you can dial these in to create some very interesting looks.

Moving along to the Glow and Shadow sections in the Style tab, this is where you can craft some really nice looks. They share some features, such as their fill options (color, gradient, or texture), opacity, and blur amount parameters. The Glow also allows you to set the Radius, which combined with Blur sets the basic look. Note that the Blur slider only goes to 10, so scrub its value for larger amounts. Gotcha warning: decreasing the Blur amount to 0 makes the entire Glow pop off. So don’t do that…

You can use Scale to make the glow larger than the text; the glows overlap using Add mode creating nice “hot spots.” Note that the glow scales up from the baseline; you can use the Offset parameters to recenter the glow around the text.

One style with the Glow set to render Under Face (left) and Over Face (right).

The Drop Shadow is straightforward and has similar features, although when you scale it large and the shadows overlap, the effect is more of a Screen blending mode rather than Add.

Saving Text Styles

Once you arrive at a style you like, check out the Style Preset popup at the top of the Style tab. Here you can select:

• Save Format (the settings in the Format pane only)
• Save Style (the settings for Face/Outline/Glow/Drop Shadow only), or
• Save All (the settings for both the Format and Style panes)

To save your hard work as a preset, select either Save Format, Save Style, or Save All from the Style Preset popup in the Style tab. (Save All includes the settings from both the Format and Style panes.)

Of course, you can also apply a built-in preset from the Style Preset popup menu, which will override your current style. It would be nice if the name of the preset indicated whether the Format settings were also saved, as some presets obliterate your font choice. (I got in the habit of putting “all” at the end my preset names when I did a Save All so I’d be forewarned in future.)

Note that if you create a mess in any section or pane, look for the Reset button (a rotated arrow icon) to reset those parameters for the default settings. You can also toggle on and off each section to troubleshoot individual areas.

Being able to save the Style settings separately from the Format settings is great, and note that both options do not include the underlying characters. Compare that to After Effects: The only option you have to save the settings in the Character and Paragraph panels is to save an animation preset for the Text Source property. But this saves everything: the text itself, the fill & stroke colors, and the formatting (font, weight, and so on). So if you just want to re-apply text formatting (the way Word would apply a “style” to something you’ve typed), you end up replacing the underlying text as well and then have to retype and rekern it.

To save your text style in After Effect, you select the Source Text parameter and save it as an animation preset. However, applying this preset in the future to another title will replace the underlying text, which makes it much less useful. You also don’t get to see a preview of your own presets (only Adobe presets have preview movies in Bridge).

To preview Text Styles presets, bring forward the Library > Text Styles folder. Note that some, such as the Calligraphic preset, also include the formatting as well as a fill texture.

To preview the Text Style presets, select the main Library tab, then select the Text Styles folder. The individual styles will appear below. When you click on a style’s name, a preview appears in the preview window using the current font style. As you preview each preset, make a note of which one changes the font; these are the ones with the Format settings included. When you apply such a preset, it selects the texture layer in the Layer tab rather than the text, which is a bit confusing.

You can delete your own presets in the Library by right-clicking and choosing Move to Trash. This is how you can replace a preset with one with the same name; just delete it and save it again (otherwise it saves it as a second preset with a “1” at the end).

Right-click (Control+click) on your own Text Style presets in the Library to Rename or delete a preset.

Finally, saving and applying a Text Style is independent of any text animation. Animation is saved separately in the Behaviors section, which is coming up next…

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(Page 3 of 6 pages for this article  <  1 2 3 4 5 >  Last »)

Thank you very much for this very interesting article.

I just bought FCS few days ago, and I am learning it…

Could you please tell me how you did the wate drop in the first video of your article (“I’m falling down”) ?

Did you use a video footage ? Is it an animation generated by a 3D software ? Is it a Motion application feature/stuff ?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/13  at  05:36 PM

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Hi Tanaka,

The background for the “falling down” opening animation consists of three layers.

1. Particles by Motion: I started with the Embryo particle generator, and rotated it to be vertical. I also changed the gradient color to Atlantic Blue in the Inspector > Emitter > Color Mode section. I probably tweaked other stuff too.

2. Another layer of Particles by Motion, this one based on the Shell particle emitter. I reduced the Spin amount and increased the Speed.

I did this a long time ago, so can’t be sure excactly how I tweaked the particles! But remember that the presets are just starting points, and they are easily edited.

3. The water footage is the background is Clip UW103 from the Ultra Water collection from Artbeats. This is a single water drop that ripples outward.

hope that helps, and glad you found it the article useful. - Trish

Posted by Crish  on  08/14  at  10:58 AM

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Forgot to post the link to the Ultra Water clip, so you can see it solo

http://www.artbeats.com/clips/8048/12141

Posted by Crish  on  08/14  at  10:59 AM

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Animating emitters problem,

When I try to put a simple motion path or a match move on the “clockwork” emitter, a stock emitter in the Library I believe, I can’t get it to move the actual emitter! It just applies the motion to the control handle. It there something I’m missing? Sorry if this is a bit off subject, but I can’t find an answer elsewhere

Thanks,
Eli

Posted by grinline.com  on  06/05  at  01:25 PM

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Eli, just clone the emitter, turn off the original, and put your motion path behavior on the clone.

Posted by Mark Spencer  on  06/07  at  11:15 AM

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