Text Animate By Glyph

Overview

Animates text by moving individual characters. Apply fly-in, soft appearance, waves, or bounce with stagger delays between characters to create lively motion such as an animated title logo.

Usage tips

• The go-to chain is text_layout → text_animate_by_glyph (drive progress with time_source) → text_rasterize → animation_render.
• stagger is the heart of this node. At 0, all characters animate together like one whole block. Increasing it strengthens the sense of sequential motion.
• If stagger is too large for the selected glyph count, its effective value is limited to 0.95 / (selected count - 1) and a non-fatal warning is shown. This guarantees that every selected glyph reaches its completed state at progress = 1.
• Use text_reveal_by_glyph for show/hide effects; this node controls motion. They can be chained to make characters bounce as they appear.
• This node does not expand the original layout bounds. If a large translation, scale, or bounce is clipped, increase downstream text_rasterize padding.

Related nodes

• text_reveal_by_glyph — controls visibility and can be combined with this node
• text_layout — required upstream
• text_rasterize / text_outline — render to an image
• ease_in_out — eases progress

How to think about it

• TextLayout stores where characters are placed.
• TextAnimateByGlyph overrides how each character moves.
• Finally, TextRasterize v2 or TextOutline bakes the result to an image.

Per-character model

• In v1, a glyph effectively means one character.
• First Glyph = 0 means the first character.
• The upper limit of Last Glyph adjusts automatically to the character count of the input TextLayout.

Progress

• progress ranges from 0..1.
• With 11 target characters, one character step is 1 / 11.
• Setting stagger above 0 delays each character in sequence.
• progress = 1 always means every selected glyph is complete; a warning indicates when the requested stagger had to be limited.

Technical details

• This node returns a new TextLayout with updated TextLayoutGlyph.visible / opacity / translate / scale values.
• translate_x / translate_y interpolate from the starting position back to the original position.
• start_scale / start_opacity similarly interpolate from the starting state back to the normal state.
• wave_y adds a sine-wave offset during progress.
• bounce_y adds one arcing vertical bounce per character.
• TextRasterize v2 / TextOutline read translate / scale / opacity when drawing.
• Transforms do not expand TextLayout.bounds; reserve raster padding downstream.
• Inspect glyph index / bbox for the output TextLayout under Text Layout (Debug) in the Inspector.

Examples

[Text Input] -> [Text Layout] -> [Text Animate By Glyph] -> [Text Rasterize] -> [Preview]

[Text Input] -> [Text Layout] -> [Text Animate By Glyph] -> [Text Outline] -> [Preview]