Importing text

Animating imported Photoshop text

About parent and child layers

Parenting assigns one layer’s transformations to another layer, called a child layer. Creating a parenting relationship between layers synchronizes the changes in the parent layer with the corresponding transformation values of the child layers, except opacity. For example, if a parent layer moves 5 pixels to the right of its starting position, then the child layer also moves 5 pixels to the right of its starting position. A layer can have only one parent, but a layer can be a parent to any number of 2D or 3D layers within the same composition. Parenting layers is useful for creating complex animations such as linking the movements of a marionette or depicting the orbits of planets in the solar system.

For more on parent and child layers, see After Effects Help.

If all text animations involved just two short words, such as Road Trip, life would be easy. But in the real world, you may often have to work with longer blocks of text, and they can be tedious to enter manually. Fortunately, After Effects lets you import text from Photoshop or Illustrator. You can preserve text layers, edit them, and animate them in After Effects.

Some of the remaining text for this composition is in a layered Photoshop file, which you’ll import now.

1 Double-click an empty area in the Project panel to open the Import File dialog box.

2 Select the credits.psd file in the AECS5_CIB/Lessons/Lesson03/Assets folder. Choose Composition – Retain Layer Sizes from the Import As menu, and then click Open.

3 In the Credits.psd dialog box, select Editable Layer Styles, and click OK. After Effects can import Photoshop layer styles, retaining the appearance of the layers you’re importing. The imported file is added as a composition to the Project panel; its layers are added in a separate folder.

4 Drag the credits composition from the Project panel into the Timeline panel, placing it at the top of the layer stack.

Because you imported the credits.psd file as a composition with layers intact, you can work on it in its own Timeline panel, editing and animating its layers independently.

Дата добавления: 2014-11-20