After Effects CS6 Tutorial - 117 - Text Along a Path Video Lecture | Adobe After Effects CS6: Complete Course from Novice to Pro - IT & Software

hello everybody how are you doing today
welcome to another After Effects cs6
tutorial my name is buddy Blackford and
today I want to show you how to put text
on a path or a mask path and we can make
it goofily shaped like it is right now
and you can make it fly across the
screen or move along the path and I'm
going to show you how to do that today
so let's get started now I'm gonna
delete this one that I have now so we
can start from scratch but as you can
see I just created a path moved it
around and that's good so let's start
delete that out and we're just gonna
create some new text ctrl T for text
tool and click and we'll just write
something here and I wrote let's make
this text fly across the screen now what
you need to do is click on your text
down here in the layer panel and then
just zoom out so you can have the whole
page showing and take your pen tool and
just draw a motion path now if you just
want to make curves without having to
make these Bezier handles you can click
on roto Bezier here and it would make
your curves for you I'll just show you
real quick again so click on Road obj
and we can just make curves like this
and it makes them nice it's a little
easier than doing the die way but I
never really used roto bez a too much
because I don't I like having more
control over the curves so now we have a
path on the text layer so let's come
down to the text layer here in our layer
panel twirl down and we've got text max
masks and transform well we want to go
to text so scroll down to text
and now we have this path options here
we want to open that up we want to
choose our path to be our mess that we
just created mask 1 and now it's on the
path well that was easy enough so now
we've got it like in a funky look in
shape so that's how you can make your
different shapes now say you want the
shape to be are the your text to be in a
different part of the shape well that's
where you come to that's where you come
down to here and you go down to the
first margin or the last margin and you
can move it along here now you usually I
think you usually probably want to hold
shift while you're doing this so it goes
across the screen a little better and if
you try to do it without holding shift
you might come to the edge of the screen
especially when you try to go left it
you'll be like pretty much forced to
stop what he hit the edge of your
monitor so we got the first margin there
that's how you do that and that's
animatable so we could if we wanted to
hit a keyframe here start this before it
comes out when it's off the screen and
come in and then reanimate this so it's
all the way at the end and then we've
got a nice little animation there my
preview panel is like hidden there we go
hopefully this doesn't take forever
there we go and there you go you can see
like that no I mean that's way too fast
you can't even read it but you get the
idea I tell you that you made it delete
these key frames so I can show you
everything else let's see put the margin
back and somewhere in the middle put a
zero I think it's probably the middle so
we got our last margin which is below it
and that's pretty much the same thing so
if you have this here and then we move
this also they kind of like it they
interact with each other a little bit
pretty much both do the same thing now
we've got this one called force
alignment and if you click on it it's
got an on and off so if I click on that
it's gonna put it across the whole
entire text here and this is where your
first margin and last margin make a
difference from each other because you
can take now the first margin and bring
it in and then you can also take the
last margin and bring it in and bring
the letters closer or farther apart so
if you take force alignment off it's
gonna bring it up back back together so
there we go for that there put these
back to zero turn this off and then
we'll go to perpendicular to path and
that's you'll see what that does easily
it makes that when you take it off it
just makes it go straight up and down or
the way that you set your text so turn
that off and then we got reverse path
which just flips it over at the top this
is easy enough
now you can use a you can use these on
conjunction with each other to make some
different looking paths so you don't
have to just have one on and one off and
all that stuff so I mean that's there we
go so that's a pretty much moving all
this stuff across the path down here in
the layer panel now you can come up into
your comp panel here and you can see
these things on the edge and when you
put your selection tool over top of them
these are the first and the second
margins let me flip this back over so we
have our margin tools here also and if
you click and hold and drag you can edit
your margins that way also this is again
margin as you can see down in the layer
panel down here if I move this the the N
Mart or the last margin there will move
the property will change and it's
fumbling with words they're still an
geez well that's a that's all for the
path here and how to put your text on a
path and move it around so just thanks
for watching this one everybody have a
good day