Animate Text Along Any Path in After Effects

In this After Effects tutorial, I will show you how to make the text animation you see on the screen. There is actually a pattern on this animation. We have a mask that we have drawn and we will make this text progress around this mask.

First I create a new composition and write a text with the text tool. I wrote the text as Lorem Ipsum. You can make text edits according to your own scene. We can integrate this text animation on the shape we want. We will try them one by one.

First, let’s select a Rectangle Tool and draw a shape on the scene. Draw it regardless of the text, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t show up and on the left side, I go to the Text section, click the icon to the left, click the icon of the Path Options section and you will see a Path option here. This Path option will have the value None. When we click on this None value, it will show us the names of the Masks in the scene. Since there is only one Mask at the moment, it only shows one Mask.

I click on that and as you can see, we have actually done what we wanted to do at the most basic level. By default it puts the text inside the area we draw. We need to take these texts out of the Mask we draw. I will set Off to On, because this property is called Reverse Path. When I turn off On, the text will move outside the Mask we draw. You can manipulate the text from the character panel as you wish.

When you want to animate these texts, we will use the First Margin feature here. In other words, when I increase this feature, we see that the words also change places. So what does that mean? When keyframe gives this property, we will animate this text. Let’s just do an example. When this value is 0, I click the icon on the left, created a Keyframe here. I take my timeline forward a bit and increase this value.

We can speed this up. If you move the Keyframe a little to the left, we will speed it up. If you want longer animation move the Keyframe to the right. But this time we need to increase this value a little more to speed it up. Let’s increase it further and see what kind of example it is. If you activate the Motion Blur feature, by clicking on this icon, that is, at the time, it must be marked, so look during the movement, pay attention to the letter M.

It’ll look more beautiful with the Motion Blur effect as it moves into this alignment quickly. Pay attention to the letter M, as the letter M passes to the other side, it is under the effect of Motion Blur because it passes quickly. This makes it look more natural on the image. This is the basic usage of this animated text, we can expand it if you want. Let’s make an example right away.

At the point where we draw Rectangle Tool, I choose the Ellipse Tool this time, and you can draw a full circle by pressing to Shift key. I let go and come to the parts where I just selected Mask 1. This time I choose Mask 2. It quickly got over. Of course, since the size of the font is too big for the area we draw, we need to reduce the size of this font from the character panel.

Now let’s play it again, let’s see what an example was it? It looks pretty good. Of course, since there is also the Motion Blur effect, we can say that it looks much more fluid. If you wish, of course, you can turn off this Motion Blur effect according to your project. This is entirely up to you. Motion Blur will not appear if you turn it off. We will see this effect when we open it.

We can expand this Masking a bit more. I will show one more example. This time, we will ensure that the text move on the Path that we have drawn, on the line. For this I choose the Pen tool and I can draw any shape. I drew a line like this, and my goal is actually to make the words move along that line and leave the scene. You can also put these lines in the scene. What will happen this time? Just as the text revolve around the circle, this time they will revolve around this line.

Again, I click on the area where you can select a Mask and this time I choose the Mask we drew last, namely Mask 3. Look, the line came here automatically. I can delete other Masks, by the way, these Masks don’t appear when I play them anyway. I’m deleting to previous 2 Masks to make the scene cleaner and replaying them.

Let’s see what the result is. Words run along the line I drew, finally stopped because Keyframe ends here. I can go a little further, of course, so far as to go off scene. Now let’s look again. As you can see, it goes out to the scene and the process is complete. I can also edit it on these lines.