Text FX Addon

The Text FX addon is a very intuitive addon to animate text and numbers. While you won’t use the addon daily, it could save tons of time when animating text or numbers. Here a quick overview of the Text FX addon, but first a video.

How does the FX Addon work?

For those who cannot watch the video, here a quick over view of how to work with the addon. The addon is divided in two sections: Simple animation and advanced animation. While playing with the options I found out that each of them use another approach of animating text. While the advanced option seems to work with modifiers like wave, the Simple animation seems to work with a more advanced script to me. Below I’ll show you some options. But first a video in case you enjoy more visuals than text.

Text FX Addon – Video overview

Simple animation

  • None: No animation, no effect
  • Increment: Shows an animated number. There are parameters for speed, start number, what frame to start. The only thing what might be confusing is that when you increase the speed in the settings, it will decrease the speed of the animation and vice versa.
  • Typewriter: Will animate text as you would watch at the text typed of a typewriter. Instead of applying this effect to an existing text-object, you have to give some text in the text-field. There are parameters like Start Frame, Duration, End Frame, Right to Left, Cursor (live in command prompt), Cursor speed, etc.
  • Scramble: This effect is somehow similar to the typewriter, but now the letters got scrambled and at the end the text is unscrambled and readable. Mind that there is a dropdown with quite some options on how to scramble the text.
  • Timer: This is like the time on a clock-radio. So hours, minutes and seconds.
  • Read lines: Make a new Text in the Text-Editor and add some lines. This option then, will show line by line. You can set the speed, etc.

Advanced

Although the animation are not more advanced, the options for text is. For example we can now extrude text, change offset, add bevel, shear, spacing, etc. Next to those settings for the text, there are three effects;

Wave: It looks like the wave modifier and we can set in what axis the text has to show wave animation. There are settings like Amplitude, Frequency, Speed as well, and we can use sound as source for the animation.

Wiggle: It seems that this option let the fonts wiggle individually and randomly. We can set the axis, easing, Factor, Random Seed, Speed. And again we can use audio that will influence the animation.

Copy Animation: To copy the animation of another object onto the text.

Where to download the Text FX addon?

You can download the Text FX addon on Blenderartists.

Installation is like most other Blender Addons: Download the .zip and in Blender you go to preferences > Addons, browse and install the addon. Then activate, save preferences and refresh.

You might be interested in the commotion addon as well to make animations.

New Media Supply

Graphic- and 3D design.

10 thoughts on “Text FX Addon

  • November 15, 2019 at 2:21 pm
    Permalink

    Thanks, this looks really useful but I can’t get it to work with 2.80. I am downloading the latest version (v1.1.0) but it asks to upgrade the addon to 2.8x.

    What am I doing wrong?

    Reply
  • April 15, 2021 at 9:11 pm
    Permalink

    Hi, I’m loving this add-on but I’ve run into one problem. When I try to render a TextFX with Time Control (with the scramble effect), the scrambling doesn’t show up in the render, although I can see it change in the viewport. I believe the problem is Time Control because I have another TextFX which has no Time Control and renders perfectly. Hopefully I can get this sorted, but either way thank you for your work.

    Reply
  • October 19, 2021 at 7:49 pm
    Permalink

    Hello, thank you for creating your TextFX Blender Add-on. And thank you for making it free! Doing this makes the Blender community as awesome as it is. We appreciate it.

    Recently I suggested to Right-Click Select an idea that is similar to this (but also much simpler) and I’d like to hear your thoughts. Here’s a link:
    https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/Z8g8/

    Reply
    • October 21, 2021 at 10:38 pm
      Permalink

      Hi Mat, I didn’t develop the TextFX add-on, but I like your proposal. And I am not the only one it seems.

      Reply

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