Text in Cavalry

Cavalry has some extremely powerful text features, in this post I’ll preview three in particular:

•The Text Shape
•Text Manipulators
•Text Generators

But first some terminology:
Text: The final vector shape.
String: The text you type in, or that Cavalry automatically generates — before it becomes a vector.

The Text Shape

The Text Shape is an Element with all the features you would expect in any vector app that can create text. Horizontal and vertical alignment, fonts, styles, multi-line support along with character/word and line spacing. This isn’t that interesting so we’ll move swiftly along.

Text Manipulators

These are special little atoms that will manipulate your strings before they are turned into vector shapes. You can use manipulators to do all sorts of cool things in just a couple of clicks.

Text Manipulators

There are also some pretty advanced features, for example you can use regex replace to manipulate a string.

Starting string.

With a Replace Text Manipulator.

The result. This can be very useful when working with spreadsheet data.

Text Generators

Text Generators will create strings from thin air, like random numbers, dates and hash sequences, they can even turn numbers into strings (there’s an example of this below). Text generators have some very useful features such as prefixes, suffixes and denominators for each piece of generated text.

Here’s an example of combining a Text Generator, a Duplicator and some Behaviours, this scene took about 2 minutes to set up.

Text Generators

Here’s a trivial example where we turn the position of a triangle into a string, then we use keyframe animation on a slider to turn that into another string, and back again.

Position connected to a Text Generator.

Other examples

Using Behaviours and Manipulators you can quickly create some effects that would be cumbersome or complex in other software, here we are animating one string into another, and back again. We’re not only animating the string, but we’re fading out the letters that don’t match between the two words with a Modulus Behaviour.

A partial transition.

Here’s another example where we use a Falloff to control the scale of the text, all in just a couple of clicks.

Using a Falloff to effect the scale of individual characters.

Dynamic Backgrounds

Cavalry gives you easy access to bounding boxes, this makes doing things like creating text backgrounds for lines, words or even characters a sinch.

You can expand these, use any shape as the background, rounded corners, you name it.

Vectors

Text created in Cavalry is vector based, so you can deform and manipulate it in all the usual ways that Cavalry offers.

Here’s an example of using booleans a Duplicator and a Noise Behaviour to create a glitch effect.

Cavalry can deform anything along a path, this is done with the Pathfinder Behaviour.

Text along a path.

And this is what happens when you simply add a Noise Behaviour to a Text Shape.

Looping noise on some text.

And don’t get me started on how easy it is to do things like this.

Setting per word, character and line colours is as easy as can be.

All this is just the start of course.

Mainframe North (@cavalry.app) * Instagram photos and videos