Burnt wood image and text animation

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After Effects text animation tutorial

In this tutorial video we will show you how to animate handwriting appearing out of thin air. It’s a great way to create intro videos. This method is not only useful for texts, but pictures as well, making it appear as if an invisible hand is drawing them.

As an extra visual effect in the video we make it look like the text is burned into the wood via a laser engraver or pyrograph.

At the end of the article we will provide a free download link for the wood texture used in the video.

To create this effect we used the integrated Stroke effect. It’s a great tool that creates the animation for you automatically. The video will also show how to change the length of the scene if it ended up being too fast or too slow.

The other important aspect of this trick is After Effects’ ability to automatically create masks from texts or pictures letting you create your intro video with just a few clicks.

We used a silhouette drawing that only shows the outline of the figure. You can use any kind of picture, but the software will have a hard time creating the mask if you pick a more complex, photo like picture and the Stroke effect won’t appreciate it either. You should try it with many different kinds of pictures, but we know it works perfectly with contour drawings, logos and emblems.

In the video we set the brightness and the glow as well. If you choose a different background it is unlikely to look exactly like this, so experiment away.

As we promised before and in the video as well, here is the link to download and freely use the large wood texture we used in the tutorial:

Download Wood Plane Texture

PROJECT FILES

You can find and download the project files at my Patreon page.
Please if you like my videos, and you can, help my work here:



39 Responses so far.

  1. Umair Khan says:

    Great

  2. I.G. Romov says:

    One of those timeconsuming bounce around, bounce back and forth tutorials. Just give us the project file, dude…we’ll take if from there.

  3. Ayjaz Hussain says:

    Can I have the project file please?

  4. jannat says:

    Your Every Tutorials Are Creative .

  5. Reno Dijk says:

    i have cc 2017 but not fast box blur where i get it?

  6. Deni Purnama says:

    verry good, beautiful 🙂

  7. Sameer gurung says:

    Its too good

  8. Amelicha says:

    After pressing ctrl + shift +H the text is gone. And when I change the end %, nothing happened. Why?

    • CreaRec says:

      Unfortunately, I do not know why this is your program. If you are not using a Windows PC, look for the Mac version of the keyboard shortcut.

    • Aniket Bhandari says:

      You should increase the brush size to 5 or 6 then it will be vissible to you…I was also having the same problem….That’s why shared you the solution.

    • Aniket bhandari says:

      You should increase the brush size to 5 or 6 then it will be visible to you…..As I was also facing the same problem so that’s the solution…

    • anonymous says:

      same problem happend with me, when i pressed ctrl+shift+H text got hidden no animation took place, windows-11

  9. Christope says:

    Hello,

    First of all, stunning tutorial. I liked and subscribed to the YouTube channel.

    There are many steps in the tutorial and you adjust the settings several times to see what works best. As there is no commentary (I know you don’t do voice-overs and I appreciate the music, which is downloadable and usable for free…thank you again), it is very difficult to recreate an exact match or at least something quite similar while avoiding major problems due to missed steps or wrong parameters.

    I understand that you cannot give out the project file because of the dragon image copyright, but you could replace it with a public domain image in the tutorial. That probably means a lot of work to redo parts of the tutorial, so if that is not possible, can AE produce a list of of parameter settings for each layer, as a text file? That would help.

    Anyway, whether you can do anything to make it more readable for mortals like us or not, I really appreciate the tutorial. One of the best I have ever seen.

  10. Christophe says:

    Oh, that’s brilliant. Thanks a lot. It will make following along so much easier.

  11. Natasja says:

    I have made a successful copy with my own text, and i wanna know if it is possible to change the text on all layers, so the effect will auto adjust and follow the text mask path.
    Also thank you for this amazing tutorial.

  12. Joan says:

    Very nice! beautiful ! Thanks!

  13. Takashi says:

    Thanks! I will study hard!

  14. MSB says:

    Hello,
    After set End % I can’t move the current time Indicator?
    Please help me

  15. lovely prince says:

    can you tell me the font that you used?

  16. mostafa says:

    Hello, I want to thank you for the good content of your site, I always follow your content. That’s it Thanks.

  17. Gator Henry says:

    Can you make one of these with our logo being carved into the wood? We’re in the wood finishing business.

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