TypeMotion — kinetic typography for Blender

Type your text, press Split, pick an effect. Every letter animates in on its own beat, holds, and leaves again — and the line reads as motion graphics instead of one block sliding across the screen.

What it solves

Animating text per letter in Blender is an afternoon of work before you have seen anything move. Blender does not tell you where each character sits, so you convert to a mesh, separate by loose parts, discover the dot on the "i" is now its own object, re-origin twenty pieces by hand, and only then start keyframing — twenty times, each offset by a few frames. Then the client asks for the title to leave again.

TypeMotion does all of that in one click and gives you a stagger slider.

In, hold, out — one operation

Eight of the nine entrances have a matching exit — Wave is the loop, so it has none. Choose one, set how long the text should hold, and press Animate once: the letters arrive, stand perfectly still for the hold, then leave. Each exit starts from exactly where the entrance finished, so there is no jump at the handover — measured, not assumed.

Split by letter, word or line

• Letter — the classic kinetic-typography look.
• Word — what most lower thirds and subtitles actually use, and far fewer objects to handle.
• Line — for titles that arrive a line at a time.

Splitting that actually works

• Dotted letters stay whole. A lower-case i is two shapes, a percent sign is three. Pieces are grouped by whether they overlap horizontally, so a dot goes back on its stem while neighbouring letters stay apart.
• Text on several lines splits correctly. The A of one line and the C of the next sit in the same column, so they would weld together if you only looked sideways. TypeMotion finds the lines first, using the string itself to tell a real line break from the gap under the dot of an i.
• Each letter gets its own origin, at its own centre, so scaling and spinning happen about the letter rather than about the start of the line.
• Your text object survives. It is hidden, not deleted. Clear Split brings it back, still editable — change the wording and split again.

Nine entrances

• Pop In — springs up from nothing, overshooting before it settles.
• Drop In — falls from above and bounces once on landing.
• Slide In — glides in from any direction you point at.
• Spin In — turns into place as it grows.
• Flip In — swings forward on its top edge, like a split-flap board.
• Typewriter — letters simply appear, one after another.
• Scatter In — flies in from random directions, tumbling.
• Wave — a continuous ripple travelling along the line.
• Jitter — a nervous shake that dies down into place.

Eight exits

• Pop Out — swells for a moment, then shrinks away to nothing.
• Drop Out — lifts a little, then falls away below the line.
• Slide Out — carries on past, leaving by the far side.
• Spin Out — turns the other way and shrinks out of shot.
• Flip Out — tumbles over and vanishes.
• Typewriter Out — letters simply disappear, one after another.
• Scatter Out — flies off in random directions, tumbling.
• Jitter Out — a shake that grows until the letter shakes itself apart.

Four orders — forward, reverse, random, or outwards from the centre — and the exit can use a different one from the entrance, so the first letter in can be the last one out.

Six easings

Smooth, Linear, Ease Out, Back, Bounce and Elastic. This changes the character of an effect more than any other setting: the same Drop In is a gentle arrival or a cartoon landing depending on one dropdown. Whatever you pick, the entrance still lands exactly at rest and the exit still starts exactly at rest.

Details that save time

• A randomness slider on the stagger, so the rhythm sounds like a person rather than a metronome. The first letter always stays on the start frame, and the same seed always gives the same rhythm.
• The panel only shows settings the current effect uses. A Turns slider on an effect that ignores it is a small lie you only discover by testing.
• The panel tells you which frame everything ends on, entrance plus hold plus exit, so you can set your range before rendering rather than after.
• Re-applying replaces, never stacks. Try every entrance and exit pairing on the same text without cleaning up between.
• Clear Animation puts the letters back where they belong, whatever frame you happened to be parked on.
• Every entrance lands exactly at rest, and every exit starts exactly at rest — verified by measurement, so nothing is left a hair off.

Plain keyframes, nothing proprietary

The result is ordinary location, rotation and scale keyframes on ordinary mesh objects. Edit the curves, retime them in the Graph Editor, render on a farm, or uninstall the add-on — the animation stays.

Tested, not assumed

147 automated checks run in a clean Blender against every release. The split is verified to produce the right number of letters, words and lines, in reading order, spread out rather than stacked, with dotted letters kept whole and spaces producing nothing. Every one of the seventeen effects — nine entrances and eight exits — is verified to animate every letter, to show a real stagger between them, and to land or leave exactly at rest, with all 72 entrance and exit pairings run end to end.

Requirements

Blender 4.2 LTS or newer. Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux. No dependencies, works offline.