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Filed under: Motion Graphics •

Animating Text in Apple’s Motion

Summary

There’s no argument that Motion offers better control over the style of the text; I especially like the gradient fills for everything and the glow per character - the latter being used in the movie below:

Motion offers enough animation control to animate the majority of title jobs, considering that most clients don’t really want titles doing figures of eights… On the other hand, when you do need to be really tweaky, I found the Sequence Control parameters in Motion 3 were just not as powerful as the controls in After Effects CS4. By lumping together whether the selection is based on characters, words or lines with the “shape” of the selection, I just couldn’t get Motion to do some of the tweaky tricks that After Effects can do with animating on words versus characters. Also, the More Options section in After Effects allow you to set the anchor point to characters, words, lines or all. In Motion, although you can move the selection based on words and lines, the scale and rotation always affect individual characters.

Another thing I miss is more control over easing. In Motion, changing the Traversal popup from Ramp to one of the “ease” options only affects how the selection moves across the text, not how the characters transition from being selected to unselected. In After Effects, you have control over both: You can ease the keyframes that are moving the selection, while also adjusting the Ease High and Ease Low parameters of the Range Selectors. These ease controls how “sticky” the selection is (the “high” point) and how hard or soft the characters exit the selection (the “low” point).

On the other hand, Motion allows you to create an animation and then Map Animation “To Selection”. This is how the Drop & Bounce behavior was created (see User Guide for a full explanation).

Motion also offer additional behaviors that are really fun to play with in the Text Sequence folder, such as those in the Text-Miscellaneous subfolder like Explode Text and Megawatts (the latter being used in the movie below):

Other Behaviors

After you’ve explored the behaviors supplied in the Library > Behaviors > Text Sequence folder, check out some of the other behaviors as well especially those in Basic Motion and Simulations. (Note that some behaviors in the Text-Miscellaneous subfolder also use some of the Simulation behaviors!) Be sure to enable the Affects Subobjects parameter in a behavior to ensure text is animated as individual characters and not just a single layer.

Applying three other behaviors (Edge Collision, Gravity and Random Motion) (left) makes a title fall down and bounce off the bottom (above - it’s a movie; click the arrow to play). Be sure to select Affects Subobjects to have the characters animate as individual objects.

And don’t forget the Replicator, which can also be applied to text. (That would require a whole article in itself… We wrote an introduction here.)

In a follow-up article later, I’ll compare animating characters in 2D vs. 3D in both After Effects and Motion.

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(Page 6 of 6 pages for this article « First  <  4 5 6)

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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