every After Effects user knows and loves trim paths but you can't apply that to
text for some reason and that's what I wanted to fix I wanted you to be able to
use to trim piles on text disco text what does it do from the name you
probably don't know and that's why I wanted to call this plug-in trim paths
text like it's a really practical name but it's also the dumbest name you've
probably ever heard for a plugin so thankfully lloyd who everyone knows from
a scripts suggested disco text to it's very punny it's a play on the word
discotheque as you know if you want to do trim piles on text you have to bake
the text into shapes and once you've baked it into shapes you can't then
change the text you can't add any of the text animators discotheques allows you
to keep the text as a live text layer and it'll trim all the paths you can
stagger them so that they all you know one after the other you can choose the
delay lots of cool things there something I wanted to talk about is trim
paths seems like a very simple thing like if I have a straight line and I
want to draw half of it which is essentially what trim paths does that's
very easy because I just measure the length of the line and draw half of it
and even if the line is on an angle you can use Pythagoras theorem to work out
the length of the hypotenuse and so it's easy for a straight line but when you're
dealing with Bezier curves trimming it is actually very difficult Bezier curves
are designed to be very easy and intuitive for artists to use but there's
a lot of very complex maths behind them which I have absolutely no understanding
of something to do with polynomials and derivatives essentially making this
plug-in was a challenge because how do you trim a Bezier curve at halfway for
example and I searched online a lot of smart people have been pondering this
and and helped me out with that and essentially there's no easy way to say
just draw half of this line what you need to do is take that line or the
coordinates of that line and the some tangents plug it into some
algorithm which is like a black box to me and say I want to split it at the
halfway mark and then what that algorithm does is it spits back
coordinates for a completely new curve that has different tangents and handles
but it looks like you're drawing half of the previous curve and so every time you
change the trim percentage in trim paths or in disco texts it's drawing a
completely new curve it's just that that curve looks like it's 1/2 or 75% of the
full curve so there's a lot of black box black magic that's going on behind the
scenes thankfully very smart people of very generous was sharing their
knowledge otherwise I would have had no way to make this plug in the the trim
parts is the crux of the plug-in and then we've added cool things like a
repeater because you know when you have a shape layer you and trim paths from
that submenu that submenu has a lot of other cool features and one of them is a
repeater and so you can draw hundreds or thousands yeah basically as many copies
of that curve and you can offset each by certain transform you can scale them you
can change the opacity you know you can make fake 3d text with it by adding lots
and lots of copies and then each copy that you have you just scale it down a
little bit so you can create some really interesting and cool effects using the
repeaters they're something that a beta tester brought up was just so you've got
a bunch of letters and you trim them to 1% so you're only drawing 1% of each
letter depending on the font it sort of just starts randomly so when I'm drawing
an A I always draw it the same way I start drawing the curve and once I
finished drawing the curve I'll draw the tail and I imagine most people draw an A
the same way different fonts start in different orders so one font might start
the a by drawing the tail another font might start by drawing it halfway
through the curve of the a when you've got a lot of when you're drawing a lot
of different letters and they're all starting at completely different random
points it looks really weird and so one of the beta testers tobias is
like well it would be really handy if instead of them all starting at
seemingly random points I want to be out of control and so they all start at the
bottom left or they all start at the bottom right just so there's some sort
of order going on and it actually looks like the text is being written on by a
human rather than by a robot that just starts it every which way and doesn't
care where he starts drawing the text so that feature is currently still in beta
it's not released but that rule by the time this video is live will have that
feature out for you guys so that's an improvement that I hadn't thought of and
very clever Tobias if you guys have any ideas for extra features please let me
know if they're not as good as Tobias idea I'm gonna reject them outright but
if you have a good idea then I would love to put it in because I feel like
this is one of those plugins where this functionality really just should have
been built into After Effects and for some reason it hasn't you mean trim
paths everyone loves it why can't you do it to text and now you can't but it
could always be improved with other functionality that I haven't thought of
yet so let me know the end please please can you like can you comment and can you
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