Summary of Text Anarchy plug-ins

Red Giant Text Anarchy is a set of plug-ins.

 

 

Cool Text plug-in

Cool Text is designed to allow the animation of text on a letter by letter basis. You can animate Scale, Opacity, Blur, Color (creating gradients), and Rotation. This allows you to create text effects that would be extremely difficult otherwise. Usually you would need to break text up into individual layers to achieve many of these animations. It is a full featured titling tool with kerning, tracking, baseline adjustment, and different alignments. Read more.

 

Font Changer plug-in

Font Changer is a fairly simple plug, allowing you to take a string of text and animate the font. You can select up to 5 different fonts and have the text string change from one to the other either sequentially, as they’re listed, or in random order. The Font Changer controls are available in other filters as well, such as Cool Text and Text Hacker. Read more.

 

Gradient plug-in

Gradient is designed to allow you to easily create and animate gradients. While the interface is different, this Gradient works very much like the Gradient tool in Photoshop. You have up to six colors to work with and four different types of gradients. You've got a lot of control over how your gradient finally ends up, so let's get into those controls. Read more.

 

Gradient Path plug-in

Gradient Path allows you to wrap a gradient around a path (bezier mask). Aside from just creating special color effects around masks, you can use this to gain more control when creating mattes, custom glow effects, build custom grayscale maps for a variety of filters (especially Designer Blur), create backgrounds based on mask shapes, and much more. Read more.

 

GridLines plug-in

Lines was designed to create the random animating lines that you see quite often in broadcast design. These lines aren't normally hard to produce, but it can be quite tedious to animate them. GridLines is meant to simplify the process of creating these lines. Like GridSquares, this plugin is based around a particle system that is designed to do nothing but lines. This makes it easy to customize the lines, control their behavior, get the look you want, and move on to other things. This ease is facilitated by Randomness controls that automatically randomize the appearance and behavior of shapes. Read more.

 

 

 

GridSquares plug-in

GridSquares was designed to make the animation of elements very easy. In this case it causes geometric shapes to be produced. Like all of the Geomancy plugins, GridSquares is meant to simplify the process of creating these shapes. Making it easy to create sophisticated backgrounds, without spending hours fiddling with a million keyframes. Read more.

 

HairLines plug-in

HairLines is designed to produce random lines. Squiggly flowing lines, straight lines, lines with no end, lines with two ends, all sorts of different types of lines. Lines are something that broadcast designers use a lot for various types of effects, and as elements in a composited piece to add something visually interesting. While these lines are generally easy to create, animating them can be somewhat tedious. HairLines allows you to easily create lines and animating them without spending much time sweating the details. Read more.

 

Path Distort plug-in

Path Distort allows you to distort an image in the shape of a path (bezier mask). Imagine creating a snake by using an 'S' shaped path and a rectangular texture of a snake skin. The texture will get distorted into the shape of the S. You can then animate the path or you can have the texture only take up a portion of the S path, then animate it along the S-shape. That is what Path Distort is all about. Read more.

 

Screen Text plug-in

Screen Text is designed to imitate text scrolling up a screen. You can have it generate random numbers, characters, or words, or enter your own text and set up a simple style text scroll. The text can slowly reveal itself, as if it’s being typed in, or lines can appear all at once. You can even set it up so only one line is displayed at a time. This is useful if a large amount of text needs to appear, and you want each new line to replace the previous one. Much easier than setting up 30 layers and cutting between them! Read more.

 

 

 

Smooth Tiler plug-in

Smooth Tiler is designed to seamlessly tile images that were not designed to be seamlessly titled. It accomplishes this by blending opposite edges together as the image is tiled. This generally creates a soft blend between the two edges and can give the appearance of a smooth transition. This tends to work better on more abstract types of things like natural phenomenon (waves, clouds) or textures. Read more.

 

Text Grid plug-in

Text Grid is a plug-in designed to fill a background with characters or symbols. These characters can remain static or change randomly and are spread over a grid. The characters can flow across the grid and you have complete control over the characteristics and the way they behave (direction, speed, etc.). You can define the number of rows and columns, the spacing, and introduce randomness into the grid, so it’s not so grid-like. Grids are really great, but there are times when you want your grid to ‘think different.’ Adding a bit of chaos will do that. Read more.

 

Text Hacker plug-in

Text Hacker is designed to convert one string of text into another or have a string of text appear out of random characters. It only deals with single lines, no paragraphs in this one. You can specify lines of text that will be generated randomly or changed, set up the order that they’ll change in, how long it’ll take to change, and let it do the animation. Read more.

 

Text Matrix plug-in

At a very basic level, this plug-in was designed to create ‘matrix-esqe’ effects, with text raining down in streams. Our example below is exactly that. No keyframes, only one layer. Just create a solid, apply the plug-in, and make a few parameter tweaks. You can certainly get some interesting effects beyond the defaults just by playing with a few sliders. But there’s a lot more to Text Matrix, including is its ability to use paths to control the streams and characters. Read more.

 

 

 

Text Spiral plug-in

Text Spiral allows you to set up text on a path. This can be done with well neigh a hundred plug-ins, so what makes Text Spiral different? Well, it allows you to set the attributes at different ends of the path to differing values. Attributes are the design options you normally associate with text, like Font Size, Color, and Rotation. Create text that trails off into space, text going down a drain, 3D effects, text disappearing into space, and much more. Read more.

 

Type On plug-in

TypeOn is a filter designed to produce the effect of a typewriter or someone typing on a computer. This makes it similar to Screen Text, with the key difference that Screen Text is designed to produce random text or text that looks like it’s being outputted by a computer. TypeOn is more like something you’d see typed in by a human with more control over the look of the text, such as kerning. IMPORTANT: The main parameter in TypeOn is the Completion parameter. By animating this your text will be typed onto the screen. Read more.

 

 

Common text controls

Because there are so many text plug-ins that share parameters, we have pages that cover these common groups and controls: