From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 06 Type and Music

The Cascade recipe - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 06 Type and Music

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The Cascade recipe

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In this chapter, I'll cover how to create a cascading text animation, but what do I mean by cascading? If you have the exercise files, go ahead and open 03-Cascade_final from the Comps_Finished folder. I'll RAM preview. With this style of animation, instead of just one character at a time typing on, a number of characters are transitioning on at the same time. We call this a cascade. I'd open the second file, Cascade_ final2, and you'll see a variation. The top line is animating on from left to right, and the bottom line is animating on in a random order, just like we saw in the previous movie. This tends to look a little more interesting. I'll return to the first composition. Now, before I create this cascading animation, I want you to understand the ingredients that make up the recipe. That way you'll be better able to customize any of the animation presets that come from Adobe. If I select the layer and press UU, I can see all the parameters that were changed from their default settings. Again, I have a text animator, and in this case the End parameter was set to 33%. Notice there are two keyframes for Offset. The first keyframe for Offset is set to -33%. And I'll explain the significance of this later. But the second keyframe is always set to 100% Offset. Another ingredient is that the Shape pop-up in the Advanced section is always set to Ramp Up. And finally, no matter what properties you add to a text animator, you always have to make the characters invisible to create a transition. We saw earlier that adding Opacity and setting it to a value of 0% was the easiest way to do that. So to create a cascading animation, you need to work with Offset, Shape, and add Opacity.

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