This tutorial is more on a technical and workflow side, rather than artistic side. I think it’s useful to know how to “read” Cavalry’s Mesh Explorer. In the video, I demoed it extensive use and showed how useful it is, when you try to find out Index Context of a mesh.

Before you dive into text animation, you should read Text Shape documentation here. Then jump into Shapes Docs here. And finally, finish with Sub-Mesh docs here.

When working with text, levels are important, especially if you are trying to add Shaders, such as Gradients to entire words or lines. It was a new concept for me to understand at first. But it made a logical sense. Text is structured in the following way:

• Characters
• Words (made of Characters)
• Lines (made of words)
• All (Entire text box made of Lines)

Once you get yourself familiar with this concept, you can easily apply behaviours, filters, shaders and so on, to areas you want. No masking or mattes necessary. In the images below, you can see how Mesh Explorer view is changing, just by using different Level selection in Sub-Mesh with “Flatten Shapes at Level” turned on.

And finally, you need to read about Index Context concept on Cavalry Docs page here. This concept will allow you to truly unlock Cavalry’s procedural side. In the tutorial, I demonstrated how you can affect certain words or characters, only by accessing their Index Number. This unlocks a lot of procedural ways of working without any scripting or coding at all.