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Tutorial 209: Font Weights
🕑 Added 2020-08-25 15:34:59 +0000 UTCWe are finally back with another tutorial! It's been a bit. I think I mentioned how we had a surprise deadline pop in for a documentary we shot a couple of years ago. So thank you for sticking around and showing your support! This week, we'll also be sending files out to $5+ patrons!
This is a quick After Effects tutorial for you. I wanted to play around with the new After Effects text expression access and I thought it might be interesting to be able to finally animate font weight with it—rather than having to animate sourceText keyframes. It's like having a value brand variable-width font!
Hopefully this expression access is opened up more in the future. It'd be nice to be able to combine styles in the same text layer. But for now I don't see a way to do that, unless I'm missing something. This seems to be here mainly to help build mogrts for Premiere, which is sad as it's been something a lot of us have wanted in AE for a long time.
Anyway, if you use this technique on anything, hit us up @workbench_tv!
Comments
Workbench
You're welcome!
Thibaut Cordenier
Thanks for the suggestion, I didn't know this one.
Workbench
Check out Fontself if you decided to try it. https://www.fontself.com
Thibaut Cordenier
I definitively need to try this one :)
Workbench
Yeah, agreed. There is one way you could make this work, but you'd have to build a custom font. You'd basically put alternate weights/styles of the font in the same font as some of the special characters, so you could use a text animator to add like 100 to the character value and switch from regular to bold for example. On the plus side, as you said, you usually figure out other interesting things when you experiment. It's never wasted time.
Thibaut Cordenier
Thanks ! Damn, I should have red that description, would not have spent several hours on that... though I learnt some stuffs on the way. Anyway, it would have been awesome to simplify and automate a lot of text animation that way.
Workbench
I'd like to be able to do that too, but—and I guess I didn't explain it so well, I must've just hinted at it in the description—but createStyle() only works on the entire text. Unfortunately you can't treat it like a bunch of text objects and put them together. They didn't give us full access for some reason, probably because it connects to some ancient code that they didn't want to deal with. It'd be amazing if they even had a text animator property for font styles.
Thibaut Cordenier
Hey Joe, I need your help ! I'd like to combine ideas from tutorials 209 et 206, i.e using regex to select words from a text and then applying diverse animators (mostly colors fills and blur), changing their colors and switch their font from regular to bold, but only on these words. So far I've only reach the first part because if "createStyle().setFont("Aileron-Heavy")" works on the sourceText it doesn't in the expression selector... I try to change the if/else and try a forEach loop but I must have used the wrong methods in the wrong place... I'm fairly new to JS quirks. var weights = ['Thin','Light','Light Italic','Regular','Bold','Black','Heavy']; var RE = /(LIVRE|MONDE|VALENTIN|RACONTE|POLICE|FAITES|INSULTES)/gi; txt = text.sourceText.replace(RE, function($0) { return '~'.repeat($0.length); ; });
Workbench
Yep! That was early R&D for this tutorial.
Thibaut Cordenier
So it's the explanation of what was part of the June or July Elements file ?
