Animating text

[jmahoney]

Hi,

I am artistically challenged, but, I want to achieve what seems to me ought to be a very simple task - though I stand to be corrected.

I want to animate, as if they are being handwritten in real time, a series of letters onto screen using a particular font style and size. I want to translate the final result, ideally, into an MPEG1.

I have no other ambitions (in the cartoon line at least) for the moment! I also have no knowledge of animation!

Is Moho the correct software to use for this - or is it overkill?

Any pointers, suggestions would be really appreciated.

John

[myles]

Hello John,

Moho is probably overkill in terms of functionality, not so bad in terms of price.

With Moho my first thought would be to put in the completed text and then use a series of masking objects to gradually reveal it.

Thinking about it a little deeper, you may be able to do something similar in just about any paint or image manipulation programs. While I don't like to steal a sale from Lost Marble, here's another way of doing it (simple but tedious):

Start with an image showing the full text. Save it as e.g. frame120.png (or .bmp, or some other format)
The only tools you'll need now will be the eraser tool and a whole lot of patience.
Erase a little bit from the last letter. Save it as frame119.png.
Erase a bit more. Save it as frame118.png.
Continue until frame001.png

Hey, nobody said all animation was click-and-go magic. Although this might be a little less tedious in Moho because you can set keyframes rather than work frame-by-frame, you'll have more of a learning curve to learn about Moho objects, masking, etc.

Now all you need is a program that will combine a sequence of images into a single MPEG file. There are probably freeware programs that will do this (Google is your friend), for Windows, Mac, and Linux (the three platforms used by your post's audience of Moho users).

Another possibility, if the font is e.g. your handwriting, or you want typewriter writing effect: set up one of those (freeware) screen capture programs that can automatically capture multiple screens per second. Open up a paint program to full-screen and define the capture area.
Start capturing while writing the text into the paint program using either a pen tool (your handwriting, and perhaps a graphics tablet and pen) or the text tool (typewriter effect).

Regards, Myles.

[T]

Personally, I think Moho would be a better choice, over the really cool frame-by-frame reverse-erase idea...

You'd have to worry about making sure that you erased a correct amount per frame, so that you were halfway erased at the middle frame (and the correct amount erased at all other frames as well) or you'd end up with a big jump at the end.

You could of course start with a higher number and just erase until you are done, then renumber... but that's really starting to sound complicated.

I'm sure you could mask out the effect you wanted in Moho, and Moho would naturally take care of a lot of timing issues (I think).

If I knew which font you were going to try, I'd like to take a stab at doing this myself.

[7feet]

Yeah, T, me too (as far as giving it a shot). I've used 2 different vectol layers as masks, one for revealing the individual parts of letters, and another to open up each letter as it appears. Move the masks as layers, with maybe with some point animation for detail tweaking. Maybe a half hour to get it? Unless its a really long sentence.

[jmahoney]

Thanks for the input. Appreciated.

It seems it is possible then using Moho - though I have to confess the references made to various technical terms leave me dead in the water. I played with the demo version of Moho last night and got nowhere fast!

The font I'm using is one called Primary Sassoon. I would upload an image of one of its letters - but this forum doesn't seem to provide that facility.

If you want to email me I'd happily send direct.

John

[T]

I found this link:

http://www.linotype.com/50064/sassoonpr ... amily.html

for what I believe to be the font you are using, and was able to create a BMP of some sample text for the font. Going to fiddle around with this and see what I can come up with.

[jmahoney]

Thanks for all the responses.

'T', I'll be very interested to see what you achieve, and yes, you've got the correct font.

Meantime I'm going to try Myles' suggestion, but not on a 'subtractive' basis.

Using Photoshop I thought I would create a layer with a much enlarged version of the whole letter - this will enable me to reduce size later and hopefully add to the fineness of final movement. The initial letter being a faint grey to faciltate placement of the black layers. Then I will create a very fine next layer in black and position it at the top of the letter - where the pen stroke would automatically start. Duplicating that layer many times I will arrange the layers in order moving down and through the stroke. Saving out each layer as a separate file I should then be able to turn them into an mpeg1 or avi.

Of course the smoothness of the final animation, and I want the final movement to be as smooth as possible, will very much depend on the number of separate files I create. However. Given that the alphabet is very repetitive in terms of down and circular strokes, I ought to be able to copy and reuse many elements.

Well, that's the theory anyway. And I've yet to discover what this means in terms of man hours!

If there's a quicker, more effective way I could do this in Moho, and someone would like to delineate the process for me - feel free to guide me. I hate spending time then disvovering I could have saved hours if I had just known how.

All the best,

John

[T]

Here's my test using Moho, and after several hours (admittedly partially devoted to the "how to do this" part of the process) here's what I have:

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/113783

(This is just a preview, look for URL link under. I tried to direct link to the movie, but it came up all text in my window when I viewed it).

I'm not 100 percent happy with this (but when am I ever), but I think some smoothness would be introduced if I sacrificed the speed I was going for.

My method was to hide all (hiding a graphic rendition of the word "Sassoon") and reveal with a mask that "snaked" (for lack of a better word) over the existing text to reveal it in the pattern that I would have hand-written the text.

Sometimes this was problematic, since a mask cannot overlap itself or it will invert masking where it overlays... like with the closed "o". You'll see that the last bit of animation on the "o" wasn't that visually smooth.

Long story short, Myles' idea seemed more reasonable after I went through this process with my own methods.

I can post the Moho file and graphic somewhere if there's an interest in the method.

[jmahoney]

Problem 'solved'.

Using Flash, I 'broke apart' the letter and using Myles' suggestion gradually erased it - in reverse.

Saved as an swf it easily converted to an mpeg1.

Slowish process, but the end result is very smooth.

Thanks for all the help and pointing me in the correct direction.

John