In this tutorial series learn how to create dynamic layouts in After Effects using Pins & Boxes. This is especially useful if you are creating Mogrt projects!
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In this tutorial you learn how to use the new Anchor Controls of Pins & Boxes 1.1. Anchor controls allow you to position the anchor point of a text layer relative to its content - so no matter how the text changes, the anchor always stays at the bottom of the text, for example. This gives you a very accurate control over the dynamic layout. If the anchor point is at the bottom, for example, the text “grows upwards” if more lines are added to the text or the font size is increased. And if the anchor is in the center, the text stays perfectly centered, no matter how many lines it has.
Do your boxes sometimes move a tiny bit left or right, depending on what the last or first letter of the text is? Also this problem can be solved with proper anchor placement, as described in this tutorial.
Anchor control is most useful for text layers, but also works with other layer types.
Tools used
Author Notes
In this tutorial you learn how to use the new Anchor Controls of Pins & Boxes 1.1. Anchor controls allow you to position the anchor point of a text layer relative to its content - so no matter how the text changes, the anchor always stays at the bottom of the text, for example. This gives you a very accurate control over the dynamic layout. If the anchor point is at the bottom, for example, the text “grows upwards” if more lines are added to the text or the font size is increased. And if the anchor is in the center, the text stays perfectly centered, no matter how many lines it has.
Do your boxes sometimes move a tiny bit left or right, depending on what the last or first letter of the text is? Also this problem can be solved with proper anchor placement, as described in this tutorial.
Anchor control is most useful for text layers, but also works with other layer types.
Tools used
Author Notes
In this tutorial you learn how to ensure that a box always has at least a given minimum size - even if the text becomes smaller than that minimum size. In Pins and Boxes, boxes are always based on pins. To create a box around some text layer, for example, you first attach some pins to the corners of a text and then you create a box that includes all those pins. The trick is to create some additional pins at the corners of the minimum area your box should have. For this we use pins which are not attached to any layer, so they always stay in place. Then you add those pins to your box such that the box always includes both this minimal area and the text. So effectively, the box grows when the text becomes bigger, but never shrinks below the minimal area you defined with the additional pins.
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Author Notes
With Pins and Boxes for After Effects you can easily create boxes around texts and also lines - for example below and above texts. But sometimes you want to place a second text exactly on such a line, and interrupt the line in the area where this second text is. In this tutorial you learn two different approaches how to do this with Pins & Boxes.
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With Pins and Boxes for After Effects you can easily create boxes around texts which adapt to the new size automatically if the text is changed. In this tutorial you learn how to combine several of these boxes into more complex shapes using a merge path. In a nutshell, you can first create several boxes - and all of them are a separate shape layer. Then you can copy the contents of each of them into a single shape layer and apply a merge path, to get a single shape including all the boxes.
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Author Notes
With Pins and Boxes for After Effects you can also create complex layouts that involve multiple compositions. In particular you can have pins in one composition that are connected to layers in other compositions. In the tutorial you learn all details about how to setup this up and use multiple compositions with Pins & Boxes effectively.
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