In this After Effects tutorial, you'll learn our favourite way to animate 3D text. This method gives you more control over each character, and allows you to add a stroke, giving it a cartoony look. It also includes an example of how to create visually satisfying easing.
Written tutorial
- First add your text, center the anchor point with control alt home, or command option home for mac. The align the text to the middle of the composition.
- Check the 3D option for the layer, making sure you are using Cinema 4D renderer, and not classic 3D. and toggle down to view the material options.
- Toggle down to change the extrusion depth to about 100.
- Right click on the layer, and choose create shapes from text.
- Duplicate the shape layer until you have the same amount of layers as characters in your text. For this case it's 4.
- Rename each layer to the corresponding letter and then delete the other letters by toggling down into the contents.
- Now we are going to colour the sides, using a swatch I have already made.
- Click the shape under contents, and the click on side, colour. Choose your colour and repeat for the other shape layers.
- Center the anchor point for all shape layers.
- Now you can see the sides are coloured correctly.
- Next, add a camera and set it to 50 millimetres. We then want to create an orthographic camera, so that the perspective is more isometric.
- Double tap A, and change the zoom to 10 thousand. Then hit P, and change the position to negative 10 thousand.
- Switch to top view and select all the layers. Use the shortcut Y to select the pan tool. Align the shapes to the center using the red line as a guide. Then drag the anchor points to the center. Once this is done switch back to active camera view.
- We will start by adding keyframes to the first character, and then duplicate this to the rest. Add rotation keyframes for X and Y like so.
- Select them, use F9 shortcut to easy ease. Then drag in to create a motion that starts really fast, and ends really slow. Do the same for scale starting at 0%, and reaching 100% before the rotation stops.
- Now add rotation to the X value, starting from further along the timeline. You can right click these, then edit the values in keyframe velocity to make the motion nice and smooth.
- Copy all of the keyframes and paste to the other shape layers. Offset these keyframes by a few frames.
- Of course you can also create other rotation animations like so.
- We can now add a subtle texture to give it more of a cartoony, retro feel. This one can be downloaded for completely free at sourcelab.shop, the link is in the description. Change the blending mode to screen.
- Add a background and move it to the bottom to view the texture.
- You might want to adjust the levels of the texture to make it more prominent.
- The last step is to add a stroke around the entire animation. Select all the shape layers, and precompose them. Then right click, and add a stroke under layer styles. Make it inside aligned.