Tutorial: How to Quickly Animate Text and Graphics with Red Giant Universe 2.0

Using the Line Tool

The last feature I'm going to show you from the Universe 2.0 is the Line tool that's available along with Logo Motion and the HUD feature for After Effects. This Line tool can be really useful especially if you’re working with an overhead or topographical map where you're showing a route on screen. This Line tool makes it really easy to create a road or an arrow that will follow your animation.

To begin working with the Line tool, again I’ll use a solid gray layer, the same one I used on the HUD tool. Just adding that effect has already given it a particular arrow. You can change it to anything available in the Presets browser (Figure 10, below) and then adjust from there. I'll select the Bezier Dash Arrow shown in Figure 10. You can change the color to something that is more to your liking.

Figure 10. Line Preset options and Effects parameters

At this point it's just an arrow on screen. Under Primary Animation settings, you can select Draw On, as shown in Figure 11 (below), and that will animate the arrow across its path.

Figure 11. Adding Draw On animation. Click the image to see it at full size.

You can see the animation applied at the 11:51 mark in the accompanying tutorial video.

You could change the arrowhead to a little car, or anything that’s representative of whatever you're talking about in your production to show the travel of that car with the lines coming up behind it to show where it's coming from.

These are couple of features from the new Universe set of plug-ins for Premiere Pro and After Effects from Red Giant. Hopefully, these tips will help you save a ton of time on your next animation project.