In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to build a great-looking text animation treatment using Adobe After Effects. The animation is very stylish and a great way to improve the look of your project.
This is part 2 of the tutorial, so we’re going to pick up right where we left off in part 1. We’re going to do some animation and make it look as if the text is being revealed from behind these rectangles. It’s going to look great.
Now, we have this really cool composition that’s going to be really flexible for text that is a different size or that has a number of different characters in it. And we can do a lot of things very quickly to modify this in a number of different ways.
The next part of this is to do some animation. So I need to animate my Rectangle 1 and Rectangle 2. Insert a position keyframe.
Go back to the beginning of the timeline and then just click and drag in the x to pull it over to the left.
Once it gets to the point where it’s being covered up by the matte, you can stop moving it further.
Do the same with the second rectangle. When you’re clicking and dragging, you can also hold down Shift, and that’ll make the movement 10 times faster than normal.
So now when you hit the play preview button, you’ll see that the rectangles move from left to right!
Now select the keyframes and Right Click > Easy Ease.
Then go into the Graph Editor and change this curve just a little bit, so that it looks something like the image below.
To get an offset effect, you need to select the second rectangle and pull it forwards in the timeline a little bit. It’s really that simple to get a cool offset effect.
The next part is to animate the text, and I need to start that at two different times. The text actually doesn’t need to show up until a little further into the timeline, so let’s move it forward a bit.
And I’m going to animate the end position. So I’ll go to maybe 3.5 seconds and create a position keyframe by pressing Alt-Shift-P.
Go to the beginning of the text layers in the timeline and slide them to the right, stopping when they reach just behind the rectangle.
Repeat this for the bottom text line as well. You can continue to adjust the timing of the text movements by either moving the keyframes or the layer along the timeline. Press play preview to see what it looks like and adjust as you see fit.
Remember to easy ease the keyframes (right-click > Easy Ease) and adjust the speed using the graph editor.
You can also use a third-party extension like Motion-3 to adjust the speed. You can grab this at mtmograph.com/motion.
Now that we have our animation complete, let’s quickly go through how we can modify it to suit the length of the text. So if we wanted to add another word to the bottom and top lines, you’ll notice that the matte covers the text on the left.
The is easy to modify. All you need to do is just extend the left side out using the slider control in Matte Control layer. And you’ll see that the text is now visible.
You may also find that you need to adjust the position values of the keyframes so that they are covered in the right places at the right times.
And this is a nice technique to be able to get this animation and have it adjustable and modular in a user-friendly way.
Now if this text isn’t positioned exactly where you wanted it, you can also move it without a problem. Simply select all of these layers highlighted below and use the pick whip to parent it to the Matte Control layer.
Open the position of the Matte Layer and adjust the position values from there to move everything.
And because I made those mattes a little bit larger (so they’re sticking off the screen there a little bit), it won’t affect our animation as long as they continue to bleed off the screen when you reposition all the elements.
Congratulations
Congratulations! And that’s how you can create a stylish-looking text-reveal rectangle animation in Adobe After Effects. Now that you’ve learned the basics, check out some of the other tutorials we have on Adobe After Effects below.
I hope you’ve found this tutorial useful, and I’ll see you next time on Envato Tuts+!
How to Use Alpha and Luma Mattes in After Effects
- How to Use Spatial Interpolation for Motion Animation in After Effects
- How to Use After Effects: Layer Properties
- How to Use Layer Controls in After Effects
- How to Animate the Layers of a Logo in After Effects
- How to Prepare Logo Artwork to Animate in After Effects
