Tutorial 38: Use Blend Sub-Mesh Position on a Text Layer in Cavalry
The idea for this tutorial came from a Discord post and this After Effects tutorial by Motion Boutique. Turns out that you can do similar effect in Cavalry, without buying any plugins. All you need is one Behaviour modifier.
Blend Sub-Mesh Position behaviour is super useful to, well animate shapes from A to B. It works great in a Duplicator setting. However, on a text layer it’s a bit tricky to setup correctly, if you never done it before.
Duplicator Mesh Structure
Essentially, simple Duplicator has 2 levels:
- Level 0 containing all the shapes within Duplicator
- Level 1, which lists all the shapes by their Index Number
Text Layer Structure
Text Layer is different, because it contains 4 levels:
- Level 0 containing all the shapes (characters) forming a paragraph
- Level 1 contains lines
- Level 2 contains words
- Level 3 contains characters
As you can see, Text Layer is a bit more complex shape, than a Duplicator. Characters form words, words form lines / sentences, which in turn form whole paragraphs / entire text layer. This is why, to use Blend Sub-Mesh Position modifier with a Text Layer, we have to “flatten” the layer’s structure to single level. This can be done with a Flatten Shape Layers behaviour.
By “flattening” the whole hierarchy of Text Shape, we can easily use Blend Sub-Mesh to animate character transforms from an existing Paragraph to new positions. It is super easy and you can get create a lot of complex designs, just with a few layers, some delay on transformation and perhaps another modifier to vary the size of characters.
Personally, I prefer to use Random modifier over Stagger modifier, to create delay in the animation. This makes the delay more “organic” rather than a linear delay.
This project file contains all the assets necessary to make animation in the tutorial in final form. Everything is labeled, linked, with expressions and ready to use, if you wish to make your own version or just play around with it.
If you have any suggestions for tutorials or how I can improve, please do get in touch. I would love to hear from you.
