Blender Tutorial: Rendering Text That Appears And Disappears In An Animation

Having text in an animation often helps tell the story or can be used to show interaction between characters in the scene. This short tutorial will show you the easiest way to keyframe your text so that it shows up when it is needed and disappears when it needs to.

First off start by adding your text to the scene and positioning it so that it can be seen by the camera. Press shift + A and add your text object to the scene. 

Once the text is in the scene rotate the text by 90 degrees on the X axis by pressing "R" "X" "90". Now the text should look like it is standing up, use the move and rotate buttons (R and G) to move the camera around so that it can see the text. 

Now that the text is in the camera view you will need to add the first keyframe to the text object, in the top right hand corner of the screen there is a list which shows you all of the items that are in the scene at the time.

Somewhere on this list should be an item called "text" unless you renamed it to something different after adding it into the scene. On the far right hand side of this list there is a small camera icon, this icon controls whether or not the item is rendered in the scene. When the icon is solid as shown below the text will be rendered in the scene.

On the other hand if the icon is lighter as shown below the text won't be rendered.

To change this in your animation you need to set a keyframe for each of these states. To set these keyframes up you need to decide which frame you want the text to be rendered on. To change this you first need to select the frame you want by using the controls underneath the animation timeline at the bottom of the screen. 

Click on the box shown inside the blue outline above and delete the number, now replace this number with the frame number that you want to change your text object on. If you want your text to be rendered on this frame make sure the camera icon is solid as shown in the photo above and then right click on the camera and click on the insert keyframe option.

This will put a green circle around the camera icon. 

To change the text from rendered to un-rendered or vice versa use the controls at the bottom of the screen to change the number of the frame to the frame that you want the text to change on. When you've selected your frame left click on the camera icon and then right click again and click on the insert keyframe option to insert the second keyframe. 

If you press Alt-A now to test your animation you won't see any change in the 3d viewport. To test to see whether or not this worked click on the render option next to file in the top left corner of the screen and click "Render Animation". As each frame renders watch to make sure that the text appears or disappears on the correct frame. 

This method of making things appear and disappear also works on normal meshes or models. Just follow these exact same steps and you should have no problems.

If you have anymore questions or anything in this tutorial doesn't work be sure to tweet me @markimo2 and let me know.