Skew text in After Effects similar to Illustrator skew

Question

Trying to replicate an animation in After Effects of skewed text on a curved path but skewed the same way text on a path in Illustrator can be skewed. Have the project started in Illustrator but cannot get the look in After Effects. I can animate the Illustrator version by doing single step PNGs moving the text one frame at a time, then import into After Effects the PNG sequence, but very time consuming and was wondering if there is a way to do this in After Effects easier. Attached is a short movie of one word on one of three curves (actually the curves are perfect circles)...there will be up to 15 words spread across three lines, so obviously a quicker way would be ideal. The skew in Illustrator is to the baseline of the path. Please don't tell me to use perpendicular in AE because it is not the same.

Answer 1

I don't think there's a way to align text on a path like that in After Effects (which would have been a lot easier as you'd just be able to offset the text along the path). The easiest way then is probably to create the scrolling effect on a non-distorted straight text layer then separately create the distortion...

1. Pre-compose your text.

   The width of the pre-comp will translate as the width of the circle it'll be animated across so set that accordingly; the height doesn't matter too much as long as the text is vertically centered within the comp.

   Animate the position of the text to create the scrolling effect.

   

2. Use a Warp effect (Effect → Distort → Warp) set to "Arch" at 100 on the pre-comped text.

   

3. For the bottom half simply duplicate your text pre-comp, reverse the scrolling (you can simply time-reverse the position keyframes). Then you can apply the same Warp effect but set to -100 so that it arches in the opposite direction.

   

4. Loop, render...