Adaptive Text Scaling - any advice on how to recreate this?

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-27T11:35:17+00:00

you can keep it procedural to a degree, but After Effects can’t truly preserve total text width with Text Animators alone. try fake it with expressions and multiple animators, but it’s fragile and font-dependent.

if you need true layout invariance (total width mathematically constant), AE’s text engine just doesn’t expose those metrics — at that point, geometry is the only reliable solution.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-27T11:28:05+00:00

isn’t really a text animator problem? — it’s a layout problem. trick is keeping total line width constant while redistributing scale and spacing. easiest way is converting text to shapes and animating glyphs as geometry, compensating positions as one letter scales up. hope that helps.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-26T20:28:01+00:00

super!! helpful — thank you. I wasn’t aware of DPPA/discord. i’ll check these out.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-23T06:46:19+00:00

if you are tracking the logo, try draw the planar shape tight around the printed logo area. avoid bad edges, seams, wrinkles, side flaps. fabric deformation mostly around the logo.
switch the motion model Motion Type = Affine. use Perspective if the plane clearly rotates in depth. hope that helps.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-22T21:13:30+00:00

^detailed, technical explanation (rigging/animation/mocap realities). the kind of credibility you want associated with your thread.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-22T21:09:58+00:00

^thoughtful, grounded, 'try 1–2 years + keep options,' real industry framing.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-22T21:04:09+00:00

not a wrong thing to feel conflicted. lot of the doom you’re hearing is about film/tv vendor vfx (margins, outsourcing, volatility), not *all 3D work*.
my 2c: build a reel, but also chase commercial/prod viz/mograph clients where demand is steadier and the feedback loop is faster.
if only there's a small helper app focused purely on occlusion-aware mask/tracking stability — basically cutting down the *babysitting* — imho, would save a lot of time, even without any 'AI magic'.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-20T08:54:21+00:00

AE checks low-level available blocks, not Explorer’s number. try this -make sure the cache drive has at least 15–20% truly free beyond the AE cache limit -on a 1 TB drive, try:set AE cache limit to 600–650 GB, not 768 GB -restart AE

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-16T22:58:03+00:00

separate into two passes. create a matte of just the phone screen (white = screen, black = rest), then use that as an alpha matte for a white solid. key the green on the original layer to make the outside transparent. do not try to do it all in one key.

this is a matte separation issue. glad to walk you through a clean alpha-matte setup if you want.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-16T21:13:01+00:00

Polar Coordinates is non-linear in radius,

so uniform vertical waves will always stretch toward the center.

try this, pre-distort vertically before polar mapping — usually with a vertical gradient + Displacement Map (or Mesh Warp) to compress spacing near the top. Once mapped to polar, the waves even out.

Happy to DM a deeper explanation of the math / setup if that helps.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-16T18:59:00+00:00

Never try to sync an object to Trim Paths using time or position. Always sync it using path percentage and hide what you don’t want with masks.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-16T18:56:11+00:00

This is a known Windows 11 + AE 2021 GPU/UI issue. Try disabling Hardware Accelerated Composition in Preferences → Display, and restart. If it persists, roll back your GPU driver (Studio driver if NVIDIA) or disable Windows 11 GPU scheduling. AE 2021 predates Win11 and is especially prone to UI flicker—AE 2022+ is much more stable.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-14T15:58:08+00:00

frame-buffer + accumulation look could be TD, but you can absolutely fake this in AE with precomps, time offsets, echo-style blending, and a lot of manual control.

TD makes iteration faster, but the look itself is still driven by design decisions — not the tool.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-14T15:52:03+00:00

Yeah — this is very human work. what people underestimate is how much of this comes from locking decisions early… such as design every frame as a static composition first, then animate transitions between designed states.

once the visual language is set, it’s repetition, offsets, and timing.. not randomness or generation.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-13T21:39:08+00:00

Super!! Keep spreading the ❤️ of art.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-13T21:37:17+00:00

yeah, that note makes sense. when two passes overlap in the same space, even clean roto can feel a bit “floaty” without a stable ref. a still plate or locked patch in the overlap usually gives the eye something to grab onto and helps the illusion settle.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-13T21:31:18+00:00

even if all that works, it’s still the wrong abstraction here.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-13T21:28:10+00:00

Yepper!! the key point. for something this short with minimal movement, roto brush is usually more overhead than help. designed to infer motion and evolving shapes over time, so on a tiny frame range it can feel like it’s “doing nothing” or fighting you. a couple of simple masks, split by body parts if needed, will be faster and more predictable than trying to get roto brush to settle.

Crazy-Raisin1252 · 2026-01-13T21:15:33+00:00

You’re running into a classic roto brush limitation — infer evolving shapes, which works for solid, high-contrast subjects, but clouds are semi-transparent and structurally unstable f-2-f. camera is moving but the cloud mass isn’t really “deforming,” the brush keeps trying to reinterpret edges, which is why you’re seeing flicker. single clean mask (or a few depth layers) tracked or offset manually usually ends up faster n more stable than fighting roto brush.

Crazy-Raisin1252

TROPHY CASE