We're back! In this After Effects tutorial, we show you a way to quickly lay out stacked text like you'd often use for price points. Traditionally the methods used for this aren't super easy to modify without killing the whole layout. This method allows you to make changes much easier, and it's a lot simpler to build and maintain.
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In this After Effects tutorial, we build a mask that can follow another layer. This technique is helpful in creating shadows out of images and textures. It's extra handy because you can set it all up with one texture layer and have everything in your scene use that single layer for its shadow. This technique can also be used anywhere else you need a mask to follow a layer.
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This is a quick After Effects tutorial for you. I wanted to play around with the new After Effects text expression access and I thought it might be interesting to be able to finally animate font weight with it—rather than having to animate sourceText keyframes. It's like having a value brand variable-width font!
Hopefully this expression access is opened up more in the future. It'd be nice to be able to combine styles in the same text layer. But for now I don't see a way to do that, unless I'm missing something. This seems to be here mainly to help build mogrts for Premiere, which is sad as it's been something a lot of us have wanted in AE for a long time.
Anyway, if you use this technique on anything, hit us up @workbench_tv!
Expression
This expression was built with Texta in mind. You'll probably need to modify the weights array to work with your font. You could even get crazy by skipping around through weights and styles. Or if you feel industrious, you could add a second slider to switch through fonts with similar weights.
The best way to get our project files is to become a patron on Patreon. For $5 a month, you get access to all of the tutorial project files we've made available as well as other monthly projects, rigs, R&D, elements, early product previews, and BTS content not available anywhere else! You can also purchase just this project file on our Gumroad Store if you would rather do that.
Useful tutorials don't always have to be flashy. In this one, we show you how a simple gradient can be combined with Posterize to make a displacement map that we can use to make some quick and dirty movement for our graphics.
This kind of setup can easily be applied to anything to add some movement. It's perfect for those types of projects where all you have to work with is a ton of stills.
On the Matte layer we're using for displacement, these two expressions are applied to their respective properties inside of the gradient fill. This allows us to drag a slider, and change the width of the gradient. It's a linear gradient with one side pure black and the other side pure white.
Start Point
x = thisComp.layer("Controller").effect("Width")("Slider")/2;
[-x, 0];
End Point
x = thisComp.layer("Controller").effect("Width")("Slider")/2;
[x, 0];
The other two sliders are basically pickwhipped to the posterize and displacement effects we're using.
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While Trapcode Particular and Stardust are both amazing particle systems in their own right, sometimes you need just a little bit of floaty bits to add to a scene. You could try to bend After Effects' aging built-in particle systems to your will, or you can do what we do—hack your own solution with text animators.
Over time we've come to find, through working with Mikey Borup and through Kyle Hamrick's wonderful Textperiments, that text animators are one of AE's most amazing secret powers. For example, AE's beta only recently got tapered strokes, but they've been hacked in text animators for years. Text animators are the closest thing AE has to Cinema 4D's Mograph system. And so we're going to continue our exploration of text animators to make some floaty particles. Check it out!
Grab the Project Files
The best way to get our project files is to become a patron on Patreon. For $5 a month, you get access to all of the tutorial project files we've made available as well as other monthly projects, rigs, R&D, elements, early product previews, and BTS content not available anywhere else! You can also purchase just this project file on our Gumroad Store if you would rather do that.
In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use regular expressions—aka regex—to style text using the expression selector in text animators. This is particularly useful if you want to change a lot of things that can be broken down into patterns or if you have text you can't easily modify, like text coming from a CSV.
The basic idea is to look for a regex pattern, and then save a string with all of those matches replaced with a certain special character. After that, we do a simple check on that saved string and every spot we find that special character, we set our expression selector to 100.
This idea was sparked by Luis MartÃnez, who sent me a comment about his method. So make sure to go see how he did it! This tutorial uses his regex to remove the hidden control characters.
I also mentioned Zack Lovatt's ASH Syntax Highlighter in this tutorial, which I'd assume does what I did here as an experiment—but in a better and faster way. So check it out if you need that specific functionality.
I hope you enjoy this one. It has some specific, but really useful utility!
Expressions
Here are all of the example expressions used in the tutorial. These all go into the Amount property of an expression selector.
The best way to get our project files is to become a patron on Patreon. For $5 a month, you get access to all of the tutorial project files we've made available as well as other monthly projects, rigs, R&D, elements, early product previews, and BTS content not available anywhere else! You can also purchase just this project file on our Gumroad Store if you would rather do that.
In this tutorial we take a look at creating an interesting loop. We'll make procedural pipes using splines, cloners, and CV Chamfer. This will allow us to create pipes, bend them, put bands around the joints, and move clones through the pipes. It's a simple but powerful setup.
You'll need to make sure you have CV Chamfer installed from Cineversity.
Grab the Project Files
The best way to get our project files is to become a patron on Patreon. For $5 a month, you get access to all of the tutorial project files we've made available as well as other monthly projects, rigs, R&D, elements, early product previews, and BTS content not available anywhere else! You can also purchase just this project file on our Gumroad Store if you would rather do that.
In this tutorial, we're taking audio and using it to drive a setup similar to the one we made in Tutorial 166: Free 3D Terrain. By adding some simple expressions to Wave World's Frequency and Amplitude parameters in each producer, we can make our own visualizer. It's like a plane of water that is affected by sound.
That allows us to easily split of frequency ranges and make a more unique visualizer that can pulse with different elements of your audio.
Expressions
These are the expressions for using Sound Keys. If you're using vanilla AE, you'll need to normalize your audio (find the highest peak in your audio graph and divide by that) and then multiply by your amp/freq variable. The first one obviously goes in a producer's Amplitude parameter and the second one goes into Frequency.
This is an experimental adjustment to the Wave Speed parameter. I ended up turning it off.
speed = thisComp.layer("SoundKeys").effect("Sound Keys")("Output 1");
value - (speed * .2);
Grab the Project Files
The best way to get our project files is to become a patron on Patreon. For $5 a month, you get access to all of the tutorial project files we've made available as well as other monthly projects, rigs, R&D, elements, early product previews, and BTS content not available anywhere else! You can also purchase just this project file on our Gumroad Store if you would rather do that.
If you're curious about that Preserve Underlying Transparency thing, check this out. I think it might've also been in one of our quick tips before because it's useful to know about anyway.
And that's it. I hope you can find uses for these tips. They've all been helpful to me so I bet they'll help you. See you next time!
Become a Patron
If you'd like to help support Workbench, check out our Patreon page. For $5 a month, you get access to all of the tutorial project files we've made available as well as other monthly projects, rigs, R&D, elements, early product previews, and BTS content not available anywhere else!
Sev, Andrew Embury, and I were working on a project using Redshift. For some reason, depth passes from Redshift are true depth passes—i.e. there's no info for focus. The depth is basically colored solely based on distance to camera.
Unfortunately, that means that keeping something in focus inside of After Effects is rather tedious since you can't just select a single grey value and be set. Instead, you have to keyframe the entire sequence so that your focus point is maintained. If you could tell Frischluft or Camera Lens Blur to stick to a point, then you could at least track a spot to keep in focus. Unfortunately, the focus selectors aren't keyframeable. So instead, I built my own workaround, as you'll see in this tutorial.
Expression Code
Here's the code to grab color from the center point of a mask. Remember to set up a Layer Control! Note, from the tutorial, I've removed the hardcoded [1280,720] and replaced it with [thisComp.width/2, thisComp.height/2] so you don't have to deal with that. If you have more than one mask on your layer, you might need to pick a different one when you set up the pt variable.
function getPoint(msk) {
pts = msk.points();
x = y = 0;
for(i = 0; i < pts.length; i++) {
x += pts[i][0];
y += pts[i][1];
}
x = x/4;
y = y/4;
return [x,y];
}
L = effect("Layer Control")("Layer");
pt = getPoint(mask("Mask 1").maskPath) + [thisComp.width/2, thisComp.height/2];
L.sampleImage(pt, [10,10], true);
Apply the next expression to a Slider Control. I made it a Master Property to get its data to the parent comp, but since you should bake this expression anyway, you can just bake the slider and copy it to the main comp if you want. The Master Property setup is nice because it's easy to test it before you bake it and if you need to change it, you just turn the expression back on and then bake it again. And as I mentioned in the tutorial, if you invert your matte in your blur plugin you might be able to remove the 255 - bit.
If you'd like to help support Workbench, check out our Patreon page. For $5 a month, you get access to all of the tutorial project files we've made available as well as other monthly projects, rigs, R&D, elements, early product previews, and BTS content not available anywhere else!
