This is the second part of the mini project we are making. Make sure to watch first part, before diving here.

I think this one is the most fun one, out of all three. We are making use of all the data in this tutorial – text and images. And to make it more interesting, or challenging, we are making it responsive. I would recommend you get yourself familiar with Layouts tools in Cavalry.

Layouts will help us position everything, in similar way the Auto Layout works in Figma. We can easily fit objects within composition and space them out by certain value. Super cool, especially in the responsive design space. One downside of the Layouts is that they are a bit hard to work with animation. Layouts will try to reposition everything. And this results in unwanted motion, for example elements keep moving, when underlying element moves. You just have to be mindful of this shortcoming and work around it. Hopefully, we will get more flexible Layout options in the future. Or maybe someone will come up with a workaround system.

You will notice that I used a lot of Formatted Strings in this project. Super useful for joining pieces of data or text together, such as Name and Surname. If you combine this with Spreadsheets, then you have really flexible system, which lets you easily update copy.

One thing to note is that Spreadsheets in Cavalry are only read one column at a time. You can use JavaScript to auto-advance to next column. Or setup some sort of switch of a controller with an array and keyframes. For this project, I decided to use Spreadsheet layer for each column. And then group them together in an Array. This is really flexible, as we can easily see which spreadsheet is feeding data into a Text Box. Super easy to check and debug design without complicating things with extra code.

I used Apply Typeface and Apply Text Material to style KreditCat name across all the languages used. When these 2 tools were introduced, I wasn’t sure how to use them. I was confused why we had extra tools to change text colour. But if you think about procedural systems, you want to have flexibility and control. And these 2 tools give us just that.

We can style text, parts of it, whole sentences. Add filters and effects. It’s super flexible and powerful, when it’s rigged to work at scale. Imagine that you would need to highlight each occurrence of “KreditCat” in text across all the compositions in multiple languages. It would have taken a lot of time. More time, than making the actual animation.

This is why I love procedural tools. Set it once and forget it. You can update underlying data (Spreadsheets) and Apply Typeface and Text Material will handle the rest.

In this piece, I ended up using a lot of Math layers to move things around. Simple left to right movement. It may have been an overkill, but I wanted to have same motion, across all the resolution. I mean same distance traveled, no matter the resolution.

This can only be achieved by with Math:

• Take comp resolution
• Split it in half
• Move the image from one edge to another
• Use math to achieve this

Imagine, if we had 10 different resolutions to create. And some unconventional ones. For example, really tall ones for some specific advertising projects. Without Math calculations above, we wouldn’t be able to keep the image moving on the screen in the same way. In some comps, image would barely move, while it would whoosh past in others. It would have been really hard to keep adjusting everything manually, for each render.