Animating Text

Apr 10, 2006

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Animating using parenting

The next task is to make it to appear as if the virtual camera is zooming away from the composition. The text scale animation you just applied gets you halfway there; you have to animate the lily pad’s scale, as well. You could manually animate the Lilypad layer, but an easier way would be to take advantage of parenting relationships in After Effects so that you don’t have to animate the lily pad independently.

Press the Home key to go to the beginning of the time ruler.
In the Timeline panel, choose 1. The Pond from the Parent pop-up menu for the Lilypad layer. This sets the The Pond text layer as the parent of the Lilypad layer, which in turn becomes the child layer.

Click to View Larger Image

As the child layer, the Lilypad layer inherits the Scale keyframes of the The Pond (parent) layer. Not only is this a quick way to animate the lily pad, but it also ensures that the lily pad scales at the same rate and by the same amount as the text layer.

Now, preview again.
Press 0 on the numeric keypad to watch a RAM preview of the animation. Between 3:00 and 5:00, both the text and the lily pad scale down in size, making it seem like the camera is zooming away from the scene.

Click to View Larger Image
Press the spacebar to stop playback when you’re ready.
Press the Home key to return to 0:00, and extend the work area end bar to the end of the time ruler.
Choose File > Save.

About parent and child layers

You use parenting to assign one layer’s transformations to another layer. Parenting can affect all transform properties except opacity. A layer can have only one parent, but a layer can be a parent to any number of 2D or 3D layers within the same composition. You cannot animate the act of assigning and removing the parent designation—that is, you cannot designate a layer as a parent at one point in time, and then designate it as a normal layer at a different point in time. Parenting layers is useful for creating complex animations such as linking the movements of a marionette, or depicting the orbits of planets in the solar system.

Once a layer is made a parent to another layer, the other layer is called the child layer. Creating a parenting relationship between layers synchronizes the changes in the parent layer with the corresponding transformation values of the child layers. For example, if a parent layer moves 5 pixels to the right of its starting position, then the child layer also moves 5 pixels to the right of its position. You can animate child layers independently of their parent layers. You can also parent using null objects, which are hidden layers.

For more on parent and child layers, see After Effects Help.

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