TypeMonkey and LayerMonkey

- Type in LayerMonkey is designed to automate kinetic text animation. With the click of the button, it takes selected layers, disperses them, and animates them. Let's see how it works. So I'm here on the aescripts.com page for Ebberts and Zucker just to tell you that there's a whole monkey family that you should become familiar with, which will help you with your animation after-effects. So we're covering type in LayerMonkey in this movie, but something like MotionMonkey, to give you an idea, works a lot similar to Animation Composer where it can take a ton of layers and autoanimate them onscreen for you.

Of course there's some differences, but I suggest to take a look at that whole monkey family. You can go to the Zucker and Ebberts page on ae.script.com to find out more information as well as see some very valuable in-depth tutorials. Ian Robinson also has a lovely course on Keyframe Assistants in the library here at lynda. So I'm just going to close out of here in Safari and first thing I'm going to do is let's take a look at TypeMonkey. So I've got my Chapter 5_8 composition, after selecting the composition, I'm going to go to the window menu and scroll down until I see TypeMonkey.

TypeMonkey wants us to enter some text in this screen and then it's going to autoanimate it for us based on some random properties that we see down here. So let's get a sense for how that works. So I'm just going to overwrite this text and type in I would like to see some dynamic animation right now! And once I've typed that in, based on again these properties down here, it's going to create some animation.

So you can see here the font size is set to Random. I'm going to set it to Constant for the time being. It's going to make everything all caps and the size of the text is set to 32. I'm going to make that 60. There is a series of spacing and rotation probabilities that are entered here as well between each of the characters. I'm going to increase the spacing to 50. And we have a type animation that is currently set. So it is set to randomize but we have a ton of options at how this text is going to come in. You know slide or swinging down.

I'm going to pick swinging down in this case. The speed is set to fast. I'm going to set it to medium just for this case. And it's going to last this whole animation for our entire work area which is about ten seconds long. By default, it's going to include a camera for us and the motion is set to Smooth, Stop and Go but I'm going to choose Smooth Constant from this menu. You can see other properties such as autorotate are on, and autoframe, and based on these settings that you see here, we can click these defaults and just simply click Do It.

Once we click Do It, it's going to create all of those text layers for us. Let me just minimize TypeMonkey here so we can see this a bit better. And we essentially get a composition which just shows us this really just one basic master control and a text layer but you'll notice that there's actually a ton of other layers inside the comp but we can't see them because of this shy switch that's turned on. Well let's just take a look and see what TypeMonkey did based on the default settings that I gave it.

Not bad. So right away, it's taken all of our characters and it's animating it there on screen. If it was just some timing changes that I wanted to do right now, very similar to Animation Composer, I can start to take some of these markers and slide them to very particular points in time. So I'm just going to slide these markers to bring this animation closer together and happen over a lesser period of time. Let me just expand the view so I can see all those markers.

Quite cool. You can see here that I'm just taking them and making adjustments to them. So, you can see there, animation is happening a little bit quicker once I bring those markers closer together. And that's how easy it is for us to at least change the timing of the animation. So we quickly take each of these items, move those markers, and right away, this will update. Now let's say we're interested in seeing or changing the spacing of how each of these letters are in proximity to each other.

That involves us actually hopping in and seeing the layers that have been shy. So I'm just going to do that. And each text character, actually has master control and it's by selecting that master control that we can start to change the positioning of a layer. So I'm going to select the word would so you can see this here. And once I start to make adjustments to this, it's actually going to change where it is in relation to the I. So if I dragged up here in the Y space. It's getting closer to the I. If I drag it lower, you can see the I has been removed from the screen.

Let's see how that updates overall in the animation. Pretty cool. So let's say again now actually looking at the see, I think it's a little bit too far away from the to when it comes in so I'm going to go down to the see's master control. I'm just going to drag it up in Y to bring it a lot closer to that. Let's just see how those now animate together. Of course then I would like to change the timing and a bunch of other things.

So pretty cool to have this animated text right away. So I'm just hopping in to TypeMonkey for one more second to show you that with my composition active that I can actually undo this entire animation. I can also just leave the TypeMonkey layer markers as-is and do a full other customized animation as I see fit. Let me just actually get out of that and also if you want to find out more information about how you'd like your words or letters to come up, let's just say rather than you wanting each separate word to come up at a time, sometimes you want two words to come up together.

You can actually head over here to this star menu and it has little items that you can place in how you want to combine words together, unnesting things, or Horizontal into Stacked is Okay, so by entering certain parentheses or certain characters you can control how your text comes to the screen. Really cool. Now let's take a look at LayerMonkey. So I'm going to head into my Chapter 5 folder. And I'm going to head into my Chapter 5_8 LayerMonkey compositional. Double-click to open that. And actually, I just have a bunch of vector shaped icons here.

And what I like to do is create some random animation between this series of layers. So keep in mind I can actually combine this with text layers and create all these type of automatic generations with this but for the time being let me actually head up to the window menu. And I'm going to head over into see LayerMonkey. And LayerMonkey looks a lot similar to TypeMonkey. It's actually using algorithms from TypeMonkey to animate this onscreen or we can choose other defaults like horizontal or vertical. We then have control over our animation of how these layers are going to animated on screen.

Right now it's set to randomize. We'll set this to swing down as we saw and have this as a medium transition style. We can see here we can decide on the layer order of how things come in and I'm actually going to choose this from the bottom down so rather than the top down. But I do want to increase the spacing between each of these layers. I'm going to add something like 50. And I want the rotation probability to be a lot greater. I want to make that 60. And let's just make a quick change here to the movement of the Monkey Cam to choose Smooth Constant instead of Smooth Stop and Go.

Just to change the animation style. So with these settings and the distribution being evenly spaced, I'm going to choose Do It. Alright. We can see there that a random layer generation was created. Let me just minimize the LayerMonkey here beside and go here. Control this. We've got the hospital layer. It rotates a little bit. We've got our next layer and it leads to the next layer, followed by the last one. We want to change the timing of this just like TypeMonkey, we start to play with these markers here in the timeline to maybe make the animation a lot tighter and to see an update in how that animation works.

Pretty cool. If we don't like the animation all together with the composition still selected, we go back to my LayerMonkey, I could choose to undo that animation. For our case, let's just say that we wanted to preserve the layer markers. I'll choose yes. Now something's happened here in my composition. Just want to outline, which is just that the background has moved to the top of the layer stack and I'm just going to unlock it for a second, move it down, and lock it again. And I can come back up here into TypeMonkey now seeing all of my layers and make a couple changes.

I like the 50% spacing, the rotation probability I'm going to bring back down to 25. Let's choose a different animation type in this case. Let's go into the randomized setting. We'll bring up the speed to fast and we'll do the layer order from the top down. With this set and the movement of the camera to be Smooth Stop and Go this time, let's choose Do It. And here we have a separate animation. So I'm just going to click to remove this and we can see here it actually saved these original layer markers which is no longer referencing it.

It has this whole new master control. And you can see there. The animation of each of my layers. Now to change the timing of this, let me actually get rid of the layer marker saved for the current time and I'll bring in these markers to be a little bit closer together so that maybe everything stops animating on screen at 6 second. And lets make a couple more changes to this by un-shying our layers. I'm going to increase the space between these two objects. The stethoscope, I've got a series of controls here.

I'm going to drag it down in its Y-axis so it's further away from that heart shape. I'll then move over to the medical kit, select its controls and do the same. Last but not least, we've got the hospital. Let's see how that comes up on screen. I'll select it's controls. Move it away from the medical kit and actually change its timing a little bit. Let's see how this now animates onscreen from the beginning. Pretty cool. So you got a lot of control of animating between layers using LayerMonkey but keep in mind if you have a set of illustrator artwork, you definitely want to check out MotionMonkey and go to aescripts.com to find out some more information.