aescripts + aeplugins

Brant Wells

Should have read the limitations before buying.

I got too excited thinking that it would do exactly what it can't...if there is a way that it can maintain font weights and spacing, then it would be much more useful

mamoworld Möhl

Hi Brant,
unfortunately, scripts in Ae can only "see" modifications that affect the entire text, i.e. kerning, fonts size, font etc for the entire text. As soon as you start adjusting things for individual letters, Ae is not able to give the script those details. Hence, as long as the Ae team does not make the scripting engine more powerful, there is no way to support customizations of individual letters, unfortunately.
The best thing you can do for now is first exploding and then doing those customizations.

Brant Wells said:

Should have read the limitations before buying.

I got too excited thinking that it would do exactly what it can't...if there is a way that it can maintain font weights and spacing, then it would be much more useful

Keely Mills

When I try to "explode" text into characters I receive an error saying "text layer must be a point text and no box text." What does this mean? 

It's a normal text layer in AE. 

Thanks.

mamoworld Möhl

Hi Keely,
After Effects has two kinds of text : point text and paragraph text (which is also known as box text).
TextExploder only supports point text.
For more details on point text and paragraph text see here
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/creating-editing-text-layers.html

In general, I try to support as many features as possible, but with paragraph text, Ae inserts line breaks on the fly to make the text fit into the box and scripts cannot see where they actually have been inserted. Hence, I cannot support those, unfortunately.

Cheers,
Mathias

Keely Mills said:

When I try to "explode" text into characters I receive an error saying "text layer must be a point text and no box text." What does this mean? 

It's a normal text layer in AE. 

Thanks.

Miika Turunen

Would it be possible to make this work in 3D? Would be really helpful. I just bought this to explode text layers that are in  3D space. As an addition it would be great if you could choose "stacking" order. I tend to stack layer from bottom to up as TextExploder stacks layers from top to bottom. I believe there are two schools at play here

mamoworld Möhl

Miika Turunen said:

Would it be possible to make this work in 3D? Would be really helpful. I just bought this to explode text layers that are in  3D space. As an addition it would be great if you could choose "stacking" order. I tend to stack layer from bottom to up as TextExploder stacks layers from top to bottom. I believe there are two schools at play here

Hi Miika,
these are very interesting feature requests! 3D is much harder, but probably not impossible to do. For the stacking order it is mostly a question of how to integrate this into the UI in the most elegant way. So I will put this on my list of feature requests but cannot promise if or when I will implement it. Always a question of priorities and it really depends on how many people would love to see these features.

Miika Turunen

mamoworld Möhl said:

Hi Brant,
unfortunately, scripts in Ae can only "see" modifications that affect the entire text, i.e. kerning, fonts size, font etc for the entire text. As soon as you start adjusting things for individual letters, Ae is not able to give the script those details. Hence, as long as the Ae team does not make the scripting engine more powerful, there is no way to support customizations of individual letters, unfortunately.
The best thing you can do for now is first exploding and then doing those customizations.

Brant Wells said:

Should have read the limitations before buying.

I got too excited thinking that it would do exactly what it can't...if there is a way that it can maintain font weights and spacing, then it would be much more useful

If you look at how people work with AE, you can clearly see that some build from bottom to up and some from up to bottom (layer stacking). TextExploder is good for one of these groups. I guess 99% of AE users do use 3D layers/text (just my guess). I understand that some feature might take so much time to develop that it wont be developed. 

I would change the name of the script to 2D TextExploder or TextExploder 2D so people get the idea of what they are buying faster and easier. For me it was a surprise that this didnt work in 3D.

PS. DecomposeText is capable of splitting text in 3D space, so it's not all smiles with TextExploder . DecomposeText has it's flaws like TextEploder has its own.

mamoworld Möhl

Yes, that's exactly why I have a tutorial on the product page explaining the pros and cons for both of them. We are always open about the limitations of our products and the available alternatives.

Maged Elboghdady

lkjlkjlkj

Henry Gaunt

Will it ever be possible to honour position frames? 

Current work flow is to create a movement, then duplicated layer, then mask, the distributed across timeline.

Being able to split text via this plugin while maintaining the position keyframes... I'd pay double for.

mamoworld Möhl

Thank you for this suggestion, Henry!
I've put it on my list of feature requests now. Hope to implement it in future versions but cannot promise anything at that time.

Maxence Bilodeau

Hi, 

The script mainly is nice. Congratulations.

Only one problem...

When I explode text by lines there is a bounding box around the line, which is great. 

But when I double click on the rectangle mask tool to create a mask around the line (which should be the exact same as the bounding box), the mask is huge and not at all suited to the size of the bounding box.

Is there any way to solve this? That actually was the main reason why I bought the script.

M.

mamoworld Möhl

Hi Maxence,
this is a general limitation of After Effects: Text layers always have the same "size" as the composition. If you create a mask for any text layer this will happen - no matter whether it has been created with TextExploder or not.

One thing you can do: Precompose the text layer with the "Precompose & Crop To Content Size" function of Squash & Stretch (also available in Squash & Stretch Free). It will replace the text layer by a precomp of exactly the same size as the bounding box of the text. If you then create a mask for this precomp layer, it will have the size of the bounding box. Of course, this has the drawback that the text is no text layer anymore. If you duplicate the text layer before precomping, you could also use CopyMask2Layer to copy the mask back to the original text layer.

Here is a tutorial about the "Precompose & Crop Function":
https://mamoworld.com/tutorials/squash-stretch-after-effects-precompose-crop-content-size

and here is Squash & Stretch Free:
https://aescripts.com/squash-and-stretch/

jungi min

I bought it.

But there is an error.

unable to execute script at line 17. invalid image data

To set this up:

[email protected]

mamoworld Möhl

Hi Jungi,

on first start TextExploder creates some images that it needs for its UI.
Most likely this failed somehow on your system and now you have some corrupted images that TextExploder is not able to open.

Could you please delete the following folder on your system:

on Windows
%appdata%/AEscripts/TextExploder
i.e. usually something like
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Aescripts\TextExploder

on Mac OS
~/Library/Application\ Support/Aescripts/TextExploder
i.e. something like
/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Aescripts/TextExploder

It contains all those images that TextExploder will create. If you delete the folder and then restart TextExploder, it will try to create the folder again and this time hopefully be successful in creating the images.

If you still have issues, please open a support ticket here:
https://aescripts.com/contact/

Cheers,
Mathias

Maleenendra Owens

Hi team,

There's an issue with it working in AE 2019.

mamoworld Möhl

What issue do you have on Ae 2019?

Note that scripts are usually installed in the ScriptUI Panels folder, which is a separate folder for each Ae version. Hence, you need to install it again for each new Ae version.

If it does not show up in your Window menu, install it in CC2019 (File->Scripts->Install ScriptUI Panel...)

or install again using aescripts manager app.

Maleenendra Owens said:

Hi team,

There's an issue with it working in AE 2019.

Maleenendra Owens

Hi, thanks for responding and sorry for my delay in replying. I was really struggling to make it work but it seems to be all ok now so please ignore my comment.

mamoworld Möhl said:

What issue do you have on Ae 2019?

Note that scripts are usually installed in the ScriptUI Panels folder, which is a separate folder for each Ae version. Hence, you need to install it again for each new Ae version.

If it does not show up in your Window menu, install it in CC2019 (File->Scripts->Install ScriptUI Panel...)

or install again using aescripts manager app.

Maleenendra Owens said:

Hi team,

There's an issue with it working in AE 2019.

mamoworld Möhl

Good to hear that it is working now, Maleenendra :-)