Turning text into liquid shapes

[animation-user-99]

Trying to create an effect where text is merged into one blob and slowly separates so you can read the individual letters. Felt that liquid shapes would work. But when I typed out the text in a text layer, converted to one vector layer, and dragged the letters on top of each other while increasing the blend percentage, nothing happened.

[Greenlaw]

Interesting idea. I just tried it, and it works here...



It's very easy. To do the above, make sure you're enabling Liquid Shapes for each of the shapes that sit above the bottom shape. To help the deformation, I added extra points along the long straight edges. I also pushed some points inward using the Magnet tool to help them merge as one.

Tip: Use Rai's Shapes Window so you can see the stacking order of the shapes. In the above example, Convert To Vector placed the first B at the bottom of the stack and the second B at the top.

Hope this helps.

[slowtiger]

There's lots of ways to achieve that effect. If it's only 1 to 5 letters I'd go with vectors. But if it's a whole sentence or more I'd render the text as bitmap and distort that.

[Greenlaw]

This shows the points I added...



The top 'BLOB' is the orginal Text after conversion to Vector, and the bottom 'BLOB' is after I added the points along the long sides.

If I don't add the extra points and push them inward with the Magnet, Liquid Shapes will do this...



This is pretty cool too, but I think the version in my first post is more dramatic.

Another tip: Enable Selected Points Only for the Magnet, and select one letter at a time for the point animation. It's much easier this way.

[Greenlaw]

I can't spend more time on this right now, but here's another tip: I think that the Blend effect was additive, so after enabling LS for each of the upper shapes you might only need to animate Blend for the topmost shape. That's just a guess for now. Let me know how it works for you.

Oh, and to make the blob resolve into letters, animate it like I did, from letters to blob, and then reverse the keyframes using Alt+Drag. That's what I did to animate the smoke coming out of the mask at the beginning of DreamWorks Curses title animation. I found it easier to animate the smoke going into the mask than coming out from it, and then I reversed the keyframes. (No Liquid Shapes though; I believe I used only Moho FBF and point animation for that effect. That was a while ago, so probably done in Moho 13.5.)

Hope this helps.