plug in creating text objects

[Mylenium]

Scripting and expressions, not plugins. The essentials are all there and as of CS4, some extended text properties are also available.

Mylenium

[Chirone]

oh right,

ok, so can i write a script that will create text and keyframe its animations and change its outline glow at a certain point?

and if so, do you know how i would go about doing that? (if it echoes its commands like maya does then that is pretty cool, if not then i'd hope the SDK has sufficient documentation :))

[Mylenium]

The scripting documentation is available from the Adobe Dev Center for AE and has recently been updated to cover all requirements for CS4. Scripts do not echo their command out put, you have to write them from scratch. In you case it just seems odd that you even would want such a thing. You can just as well create a text animator for the outline property with conventional keyframes (which in turn, could be created by a script) or expressions.

Mylenium

[Chirone]

thanks for the reply

the reason why i need a script to do it, is because this will be applied to a few hundred (maybe over a thousand, the number will vary) text objects

creating a thousand text objects and then creating the animation for them by hand takes way too long, and it should be something that can be done using a script. At least. that's what i believe

ok, but to be more specific as to what i want the script to do is:

say i have 1000 words, and i want them to exist for a certain amount of frames.
during the time they exist they will animate (keyframe animation is sufficient).
at a certain frame the word's outline will change and then some kind of effect will be applied and the characters will individually vanish in a fancy way

i need the script to:
- read in a text file
- create a text object that exists for a certain length of time, and animates transformation values
- keyframe the outline (information provided by the text file)
- change the colour of the outline of ALL words at once
- apply a behavior that will trigger at a certain unique frame (specified by the text file for a particular word)

is this possible in AE?

[Chirone]

ok, nevermind,
i seem to have got a few of those things on the list done already

i would like to say... AE is SOOO much easier to develop for than Motion....
anything you need to know you can find in a matter of minutes
in the time between this post and my last post i have already learnt javascript (didn't know it before) and got the script to read a text file and create text layers and change their position

haven't got to the keyframing of stuff yet, but i should have it sometime soon.

whereas with Motion you can't even do that sort of stuff... and there is less examples for FXPlug than there are for AE scripts...

i will have to get the boss to buy AE now.... trials only last for so long ;)

[Mylenium]

Yepp. Also check AEnhancers.com. There are already a number of "Karaoke" scripts that may in part already do what you need. You could at least borrow the code bits and general concepts.

Mylenium

[Chirone]

sweet,
thanks for the pointer man :scream:

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