Text FX

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.

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.