Hey guys, this is Parker with Animoplex.com and I'm here to show you how to
create a futuristic UI text effect in After Effects.
I'm also going to share the preset files with you in the hopes of saving you some time.
So I'm gonna jump right in here and create a new text layer, and call this Loading Interface.
You can call this whatever you want, I just thought this was kinda cool.
So the first thing we're gonna do, I'm gonna twirl down the properties
And next to the Text Property, there's gonna be an Animate menu. So if I open that up
And I'll see the Opacity, I'm gonna go ahead and add that. It's automatically going to add a
Range Selector and an Opacity effect So I'm gonna bring the Opacity down to 0.
It's gonna make the text disappear, and I'm gonna twirl down the Range Selector.
and the Advanced menu.
So, in order to keyframe this over time, I'm gonna add a keyframe on the Start property
at 0% and move forward in time, let's go to 30 frames, and I'm going to keyframe this to 100.
So you saw what it did right there, it's basically bringing this in from left to right in a linear fashion.
This is kinda cool if this is what you want it to look like.
Feel free to stop here. I'm gonna keep going and I'd like to add some randomness to this.
So if I come down to the Randomize Order under the Advanced menu,
it's keyframed to Off. I'm gonna change it to On.
And you'll see immediately what it's doing. It's basically bringing on each letter, randomly.
And it's not doing the left to right anymore. So that's kind of a cool look.
This might also be what you're looking for, so you can stop here if this is the effect you're going for.
But I'd like to add some flickering to it, like you saw earlier.
So this is the last step, and in order to do that you're gonna go to the Random Seed.
And basically, what we wanna do is take the Random Seed and change it
for each frame of the animation. So you want it to constantly change every frame.
So the best way to do this is to use a Time Conversion expression.
And the way I'm going to do that is Alt+Click (Windows) or Option+Click (Mac)
the stopwatch on the Random Seed. And it's going to bring up this expression window
and inside the expression window I'm going to type "timeToFrames, open parenthesis,
close parenthesis." This is a Time Conversion expression.
And basically, what is going to do, it's going to take the current frame number and inject it
into the value of the Random Seed. So, essentially, every frame it's changing
the Random Seed which gives you that really cool flickering effect.
So if you RAM Preview this, it's gonna play. It might be a bit too fast,
this might be too fast for you. If this is flickering too quickly, I think it is,
I want it to go a little bit slower. So I'm gonna come down to the expression we just typed
and I'm going to divide this number, so "forward slash", by let's start with 2.
So I'm gonna cut it in half. So now we're on frame 10, but the value is 5, so half as fast.
And that's getting a little better. You can keep going, I'm actually going to divide this by 5.
So it's going to go pretty slow.
Alright, so this is kind of closer to look I'm going for. Now it might be animating on too long.
It might be taking too long to finish. If that's the case, you can always
bring the Start keyframe back a little bit. I think this is gonna do it.
Yeah, this is looking great. So I've got the Random Seed divided by 5.
And I'm going over 20 frames for the full animation, so this is looking pretty good.
So, in the interest of saving you some time, I have actually created some presets
with all of these effects that we just covered. So, I've created a new comp here with some
example text layers, and I'm gonna show you each one.
I'll show you how to install these in a minute, let me just go through them real quick.
So here's the animation presets and the user presets, and this is where they're located.
So I have a Linear Fade which was the first step that we covered, I have a Random Fade,
and a Random Flicker. So the Linear Fade, if I double-click this Linear Fade, it's gonna add it
to my text layer. If I hit "U" and twirl down the keyframes here, you'll see it's added a
Start and an End, and it's just going from left to right, linearly,
just like we looked at earlier. I've also got a Random Fade, so if you
double-click the Random Fade and hit "U" to open up, you'll see the keyframe here.
It's also the same setup. This one is going random, so each letter is coming up in a
random fashion and it's based on the layer index, so if you were to duplicate
this and had the same text it's going to actually come in different than the one above it
because it's going, the Random Seed is driven by the layer index.
So that's kinda useful.
And then finally we have the Random Flicker. So if I go to the first frame,
double-click the Random Flicker, and hit "U", this is going to
do the flickering we had talked about earlier. Now it's set to divide by 2 by default,
but if you double-tap "U + U" and you'll see the expression here, and I'm dividing by 2
you can slow it down by 5 if you'd like. That might give you a nice look. Here's all three of them,
just kind of back to front, and they're looking pretty good!
So I hope these save you some time. They are a great way to reveal text, especially if you're
doing futuristic HUD's or other projects that require modern text treatment or UI design like this.
So now I'm going to show you how to install these presets.
So, if you've downloaded the ZIP file that's linked in the description,
You'll get this ZIP file, and if you open it up you'll see Resources folder with some stuff
a README which has instructions, and these three FFX files. Now these are the
effect preset files that After Effects needs, so if you select them all, Copy and navigate
to your User Presets folder which the path for it is going to be
User Folder > Documents > Adobe > After Effects (version) > User Presets
so if you go into that folder, it might be empty, you may already have some installed.
I've already got these installed, so I'm not gonna actually Paste them, but you would
Paste them in here, and then when you restart After Effects, or open it up,
they will show up under your Effects & Presets window,
Animation Presets > User Presets, and then they'll show up right here and all you have to do
to apply them is double-click. So if you have a new text layer here, all you have to do is
double-click the one you want to use and it will automatically add the keyframes.
and all the effects needed.
So if you have any questions about this method, or any examples of how you
used these presets, please let me know in the comments or you can
email me: support@animoplex.com and I'd be more than happy to take a look.
I hope you learned something and I'll see you next time!