Bassam Kurdali has created a quick addon for creating a typewriter effect.
Bassam writes:
It’s been a great week here since Pablo arrived and has been doing amazing work shading Gilga’s hair with cycles- can’t wait to show his results. This weekend, we took some downtime, hanging out and blending at the Haymarket Cafe. Famed Gnome designer Jakub Steiner was lamenting the lack of an easy way (there is of course, a difficult way) to make a quick ‘typing’ effect for Blender text objects. I thought it would be a fun hack so I made this addon.
Link
23 Comments
Excellent! :-) I have gone to painstaking ends to make this happen in the past... well ok, not really that hard, just time consuming and boring lol, but this makes it much better :-)
Such a simple idea, but really useful!
Well done.
Just wondering if the text field can have an auto complete with the names of the text blocks that are defined? (There's plenty of other text fields in Blender with this feature, so hopefully?)
Wow, really nice! :)
Blender text tools really needs to be upgraded at some day and this is really good thing for it. :)
This looks great. But I can't seem to get it installed. I copied the text and saved as .py, put in the appropriate folder and...nothing.
really nice add on, this little things makes blender better and better!!
Nice one! I made an add-on similar to this last year as I was showing a friend how cool blender was and he asked about making text appear like it was typing.
So I made an add-on then told him how awesome it is that if it doesn't have a feature we can add one :P.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?261705-Animated-Typing-Text-addon
This is actually easier than doing it in After Effects.
Definitely been looking for this feature for a long time. If Bassam reads this page, I would like to make 1 suggestion though, an extra feature to allow optionally adding text by newlines instead of just per-character.
As a noob, it took me while to add the script (text editor > text > create text block, *paste the script*, text > save as, then user prefs > addons > install from file).
But i can't figure out how he's adding the keyframes at 00:54 in the video. 'I' adds keyframes but they don't apply to the character count. Can't find it at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual . Thanks guys.
Are you hovering over the character count control when you press "I" ?
Perfect! I was hovering over 3D view, timeline, dopesheet, everywhere but the right place. :)
i have done the copy/paste thing, but nothing. is there a specific naming convention? i know .py but anything else? i have installed from file, nothing. i have put it in every possible scripts folder, nothing. arggg!
If you go to the plug-ins tab in the user settings window, you'll see a button called "Install from file". Click it and browse to the .py file.
After 'install from file', did you go back to addons and select 'text: typewriter text' in the list?
Thanks for your responses. I finally got it to work. Throw enough noodles at the wall, one is bound to stick. I remembered that Python was picky about spaces and indents so I removed them and then saved it out. I am guessing that is what the problem was.
Thanks again!
B
Hey Revanek - You can add line by line... You just need to know how many characters on each line, then put two keyframes one frame apart with the different numbers and voila! (Hope that made sense).
Great stuff!
Thanks for your efforts!
Is having it automatically pull from a text block based on source value safe? If the literal context a user enters happens to match a block name they would get an expected result (unless I misunderstood how it works). Maybe add a check box to enable that?
Now all that is missing is an optional viewport setting (i.e. the first and last line [or line count from first]) so then one could animate what looks like a computer screen generating output and scrolling as it goes by. Just a thought. =)
And if you _really_ have lots of idle time on your hands, even word and line modes (instead of characters) as the unit. Not for me so much.. I'm just thinking of the masses that get a taste, like what they see, then want more! [Ok, turns out someone else already mentioned one part of that.. see, the "want" is spreading already]
Oops.. "literal context" should have read "literal content". Less confusing that way.
Nice to see someone using Blender under Gnome3/linux, just like myself. :)
Really cool plugin. Has this been submitted to the SVN so it can be built into Blender? It needs to be...
does not appear to work in 2.66. will not enable in the addons.
It works great, but not for Blender Game Engine which sucks! :( I can animate it indeed, but not save my animation into an Action :( Maybe you can add this feature in future updates?!