The assignments in the previous lesson were not technically difficult. All they required was careful observation and patient thinking. Therefore, we will not give a detailed review, only a brief introduction. And attached PSD source file for your reference.
The way to change text from black to white is to create a white text layer and animate the fill opacity of the text layer to create the effect from black to white. In fact, it should be a fade-in effect that gradually appears, just because the background is black. The effect of the edge of the text is stroke, using pattern stroke. The pattern stroke can be adjusted by dragging with the mouse, and it is this position that creates the animation effect. Most edge flickering effects can be created this way. In addition, you can also try to animate the scaling of the pattern, and the effect will be similar. If a warning about missing fonts appears after opening, you can use other fonts without much impact on the final effect.
Among the content of Photoshop animation, the most important concepts are basic timeline, key frames and other concepts. On this basis, to make animation beautiful and detailed, you need to rely on style. Therefore, being proficient in using layer styles is also an important condition. This lesson will introduce you to another animation basic, using masks in animation. Of course, before this, everyone is required to have fully mastered the knowledge of the mask part in the basic tutorial, so we will not introduce it again here. If you want to know more about this.
In timeline projects, everyone has seen mask projects, which are divided into ordinary dot matrix masks and vector masks. Each of them has two animation items, one is the position of the mask, and the other is the activation of the mask.
The so-called enablement refers to the effectiveness of the mask, that is, on or off. It can be used to control the appearance or disappearance of objects, but it cannot have transition effects. In other words, it is either completely there or not at all, but there is no transition between the two. The practical value is not very great, because we can achieve the same effect directly by using layer opacity and "preserve interpolation".
The mask position is a very useful item if we want to create an animation that simulates a progress bar, as shown in the figure below. Since Photoshop does not support deformation animation, it cannot be achieved simply through the transform command. Although it can be produced through the "independent layer" introduced before, it is too cumbersome and has poor editability in the later stage.
It is very simple to use a mask to create this animation. Draw a rectangle in a new layer, create an all-white mask, fill it with black, and release the link between the mask and the layer, as shown in the left picture below. . Then you can set the animation item of the mask position. The process is very simple, that is, keep the mask completely black at the beginning, and move it (customized to the left or right) at the end until the white is completely exposed, that is, until the layer content is no longer blocked. The animation file is set to 1 second and 15fps.
The mask can also be made with a gradient, as shown in the right picture below. This will make the end of the progress bar appear smoother.
In addition to moving the position of the mask, you can also move the content in the layer while keeping the mask unchanged. Create a text layer and use the gradient tool to mask it with a symmetrical gradient effect. The image effect is shown in the left picture below, and the layer palette is shown in the right picture below. Once the mask is unlinked, you can animate the layer's position. Note that this is no longer the mask position item, but the layer position we learned before. The animation file is set to 2 seconds and 15fps.
Although the mask is not moved directly at this time, the animation must be completed with the help of the occlusion effect of the mask, so it is still classified as a mask animation.
Different from the text movement we did before, the above effect can be called text scrolling. The main difference between the two is that the text content of the former is fully displayed, while the latter appears in turns. If you want the scrolling text to have a looping effect, you need certain skills. The reciprocating setting is not suitable for this. Due to reading habits, it is not suitable to scroll the text in the opposite direction and then scroll back, just like a sentence cannot be read in reverse. Same. Although the default loop playback is also a solution, it will leave a gap after the last letter of the text.
We can create a loop effect without white space by copying the text content. Copy the text content into two copies and connect them after the original text, that is, "Photoshop" becomes "Photoshop_Photoshop_Photoshop". At the starting moment, place the joint between the first two words, "p_P", in the center (or somewhere) of the layer, and at the end, move the second joint to roughly the same position. Small differences are less noticeable in animation, so inaccuracies are okay. If you want to be precise, you can establish a reference line for precise alignment based on the strokes of a certain letter (such as the left vertical stroke of P).
At this point, the loop effect has been formed, but there are frames in the same state at the start and end moments. Since this is not a symmetrical reciprocating animation, you can directly move the keyframe of the end moment (01:14) to 02:00, as shown in the figure below. If you have mastered what you have learned before, you can understand that the 02:00 moment does not actually belong to the animation process. The real animation process is from 00:00 to 01:14.
Not only text, but also various graphic symbols can also be made into one-way loop animations according to this method.
This is the technical content of mask animation. It is not advanced, but if you combine it with previous knowledge, you can create many effects. For example, we have previously learned the angle gradient animation in layer style animation, which can be further produced using masks. An ordinary angle gradient is shown in the left image below, and we add a vector mask to it, as shown in the right image below. You can animate a circular progress bar. Click here to download the PSD source file of this animation . For everyone to analyze on their own.
While a raster mask can be used here, vector masks adapt well to image scaling. This makes it easy to change the animation to any size to suit different needs. The difference between lattice and vector and the drawing of vector path have been introduced in the basic tutorial part. Later lessons will introduce the impact of animation size on the number of bytes.
Change the mask above to a ring or change the gradient style to get additional animation effects.
In addition, the gradient of the same color stop can animate the change of the color stop position, as shown in the figure below. It can create the effect of gradual unfolding of gradients.
You may think that the example animations are always in black and white and grayscale, which is too monotonous. This is actually the method we adopt from a teaching perspective. First, grayscale can express the content clearly without color interference. Secondly, grayscale can easily be mixed in different ways. Patterns work on any color, so you can achieve great results with simple modification steps. We have already introduced this in Chapter 11, Section 6 of the basic tutorial. You can click to watch the video tutorial of this section. Text tutorials are only included in the published book "The Master's Road-Complete Analysis of the Chinese Version of Photoshop".
We add upper shadow, outer glow, etc. to the animation, and change the color of the fill and the overlay method of the gradient, and we get the image effect as shown below. Note that the document setting of this animation has been changed to 10fps. The reason for the change will be introduced later.
Up to now, we have basically used a single layer as the object of animation, but this does not mean that we have to be so "economical" in actual production. You can use multiple layers to create richer animations. However, we still have to follow this principle, which is to use as few layers as possible to create. Because too many layers can easily cause confusion and are not conducive to later modifications. Another principle was mentioned in the basic tutorial, which is to use vectors as much as possible.
Below is our animation composed of two layers. Since the size of this animation is too large, it will not be displayed on the web page. You can treat it as homework, and we provide source files for everyone to study.
Photoshop can also animate layer groups, but only the overall opacity of the layer group, and the layer group mask. Layer group position animation is not supported, which is somewhat regrettable. If we can support layer group position animation, we can easily create relative movement. For example, first make the text move horizontally on the button, then form a layer group with the text and button, and then define a vertical movement animation for the layer group, and you can complete the above task.