Graphics

If I would like to make an animation that reveals a Text field letter by letter - how do I do this in Xpression?

Hello Egil,

The easiest way would be to use a Stagger Animation. With these animations you only have to build the animation once and then you can drag it onto the Textfield-layer inside the Scene Director.

In the properties of the Stagger Animations you can select an option to perform this animation on characters individually and you can even determine the speed or the pause between two letters.

This way you can build a sort of typewriter effect where every letter individually will be shown one by one.

The good thing about this is also that it doesn't matter how long the text is. Even if you change the text, the animation stays the same because it is applied to the textfield itself.

Let me know if this was enough information for you, if not I can always take a few screenshots to show you how to do it.

Best regards,

Kenneth

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Thank you for response

I have not yet dived into the Stagger Animations - will do that now and come back to you later if I need some more advice

Regards

Egil

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After toying around a bit with it I found out how to use this Stagger thing for this :-)

#XPression

Hi Egil,

I've uploaded a pdf which explains how to create a Stagger Animation. You can download it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w8nu303ll51hu2d/Stagger%20Animations.pdf

The difference between a Stagger Animation and a normal animation which you build using the Animation Controllers, is that Stagger Animations are generic animations which you can apply to different objects.

Let me give you an example. If you have a scene where you perform a lot of fade ins (which all have the same length) of different objects, you could use the Animation Controllers for that. But it means that you would have to create an animation controller for every object that you want to fade in because Animation Controllers are linked to an object in the scene.

By using a Stagger Animation, you create an animation which is not linked to an object when you create it. But you can apply it to an object. So you don't have to create the same animation again and again but you only need to create it once, and then just select the object you want to use it on by sliding the animation onto the object in the Scene Director.

So you take the Stagger Animation and you can apply it to multiple objects in the same scene. It saves you a lot of time. However I should mention that it's not as powerful as the Animation Controllers as only a handful of properties of the objects are supported in the Stagger Animations. But for 60 to 70% of the average animations that you create, the Stagger Animations can be used.

So it seems that you already found how to use it but if there should be any other questions, just shoot!

Kenneth

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Thank you!

That was immensely useful :-D

Best Regards

Egil

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