How to Ease the Shape and Add a Fill Color in Adobe After Effects 7

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Now we are going to use the option specifically here so make sure that you set the randomize order back to off again and go back to the shape menu here and you will see a further two options available to you, the ramp up and the ramp down features. These can be slightly confusing because they do very similar things, it is quite simply which direction do they do it.

Go ahead and choose ramp up and then what you will see is a general ramping up from the original text all the way up to the affected text over here on the right hand side. Now this is a fairly linear change again starting on the left hand side of the range selector and ending at the right, but instead of like before having the affected text in the center and tapering back down again to the original text to the end, it leaves the text and its affected state after the final range selector. So it is actually ramping the effect from 0 to100% up at this end.

Now likewise if you ramp down it is going to go the other way. The type is affected to start with the range selector area becomes the transition area that returns the text back down to its original size. Now we are going to use that for a very nice text option in just a short while, but for now let us set our shape back to smooth because there is one other option that I want to quickly show you under here.

Now the smooth option is effectively based on a base type theory, where so much as if you have a scale point over here the beginning of the range selector and a better handle that is coming in and defining a curve that starts and gently eases up, and again in the center we have a pointer it has a handle on each side, and those handles are choosing how smooth the transition is between the affected text and the original state of the text over here. So it is kind of like you have two main sets of control here, the low part of the selection and the high part of the selection.

Well these are in fact editable using the ease high and ease low functions down here on the timeline. If you were to drag the ease high value to the right more and increase it, you will notice that the ease is a lot more sudden as it drops off towards the edge here. It actually tells the characters to stay the shape for a lot longer and then all of a sudden there is less distance in which they can return to their original size so they have to do that fairly quickly.

Now in this case because there is only a few characters, the steps are quite sudden, but maybe if you had 40 or 50 characters selected you would still notice quite a smooth transition even though the ease values are set high. So this is actually quite a good example that highlights that for you.

Now likewise, you could set it to a minus value which actually narrows it down almost into a triangular form here so there is really no ease. It is kind of coming out to a point, and naturally the other option to ease the low would do the opposite at the other end. So if I just set the ease high here to around about 0 again, so we have a nice ease in the center, the ease low will choose how the text is easing on either end of the range selector. So in this case it is a much softer transition where the characters stays smaller for slightly longer and then are forced to zoom out quite quickly to combine with the ease value that we have here in the center.

So these two values can be adjusted to work in conjunction with each other so you get a much smoother fine control of you text and the way it wants to look and feel, and just remember that when you have got all of that setup, the core function here is take the offset value and simply animate that moving through they type back and forth, and do not forget you can also turn on that randomize option and have some real fun with that.

Another thing you can do is also add other properties into the area that is being selected, so if we just scrub it out again to a roughly in the center, and maybe let us add another animator to this. Let us turn off the advanced for a second because we are done with that for now, but inside animator 1, let us go to the add button go across the property and just choose fill color RGB. Now what after effects will do is use a default red color to fill the text that is inside the range selector, but because we have a smooth shape selected it is transitioning to scale, the tracking, the anchor point, and in this case the color smoothly between the most affected value here in the center and the none affected value over here at either end.

Again if you scrub the offset value through, after effects is going to scrub that color through. So this almost gives the effect that the text is getting larger and maybe closer towards us, maybe it is getting warmer or hotter, therefore it changes into red and as it shrinks backward slightly, it returns back to its original color and almost looking cooler.

So just by adding a single property in there, you do not have to do anything else. After effects is using the smooth easing function there to take care of the rest of it.