How to simulated handwriting text

[strider2000]

I was playing around with handwriting text and thought I'd share a quick approach. Nothing amazing for advanced users, but hopefully it can help people who are newer users and interested in the topic.

[synthsin75]

Simple solution for very convincing results. Nice work.

[strider2000]

Thanks Wes. It's always fun playing with and learning new things in Moho

[SimplSam]

Works surprisingly well. I think the noisy interp helps with that.

You could also have used a Group-mask for the masking - which would have negated the need for background matching.

[strider2000]

You could also have used a Group-mask for the masking - which would have negated the need for background matching.

Thanks. I don't use masks much. I know they're super powerful, I just haven't personally used them much, so I didn't know that. Thanks for sharing!

[Daxel]

Looks great, thank you.

Noisy interpolation is pretty cool. As an idea, for something more precise, the Follow Path could work too.

[synthsin75]

As an idea, for something more precise, the Follow Path could work too.

Since the text is composed of closed shapes, you'd have to create your own single path to follow.

[Daxel]

Since the text is composed of closed shapes, you'd have to create your own single path to follow.

Exactly, for more precise control, like a more realistic animation style. And using the animated strokes at the same time.
But this case is simple and looks great. Not realistic, but convincing.

[synthsin75]

Since the text is composed of closed shapes, you'd have to create your own single path to follow.

Exactly, for more precise control, like a more realistic animation style. And using the animated strokes at the same time.
But this case is simple and looks great. Not realistic, but convincing.

While you could definitely make a follow path to match the print text, it'd have to be strokes (without fills) for animated strokes to work. If you were going for realism, you'd also want to animate the fingers/pen more than just layer translation.

[ggoblin]

Very clever, thank you strider2000 for sharing!

Wiki says that videoscribe, a whiteboard animation package, was written in flash. It basically follows the strokes in a svg file, drawing them as the pen goes over them. I wonder if something like that is possible in Moho, perhaps with a script? I notice when I preview render a complex svg file in Moho i can see it drawing those strokes one at a time.

[synthsin75]

Wiki says that videoscribe, a whiteboard animation package, was written in flash. It basically follows the strokes in a svg file, drawing them as the pen goes over them. I wonder if something like that is possible in Moho, perhaps with a script? I notice when I preview render a complex svg file in Moho i can see it drawing those strokes one at a time.

That's what the menu script Scripts>Draw>Animated Strokes does. Then you can use the follow path tool to match up the pen/hand.

[ggoblin]

I'm not sure how to use the script.

I imported a svg image, selected the script. The popup box asked duration, I entered 240 frames and pressed ok. Nothing seemed to happen. I pressed play to see if anything in the timeline had changed.. couldn't detect anything, rendered a frame thinking maybe its only visible in the final render.. still nothing.

If you have the time, an example would really help.

[synthsin75]

You need to select the points of the vector curve, so Moho knows what you want to apply it to.

[Greenlaw]

Just playin' around since I'd never used the script before....





The one thing about this script is that it assumes the first point drawn is the beginning of the Stroke Exposure. That makes sense, just something to be aware of. That said, for some reason I had to reanimate the first leg in the H to make it draw in the correct direction, and I'm not sure why because I drew this with the Freehand tool the way it's animated. Maybe because both paths are in the same layer?

Anyway, considering the time I spent fixing this, it probably would have been faster to just keyframe the Stroke Exposure by hand. Just FYI.

[ggoblin]

Seems silly not realising that I should obviously select the points before running the script.

Thank you for the example Greenlaw.

The script works very well.



But I don't think we can use the follow path tool for the pencil and hand as apart from very simple examples, svg images can have hundreds of paths. Creating our own custom path to follow all that doesn't seem practical.

I wonder if there is a way to combine all the paths in the svg to one path so that we can use follow path tool (without changing the ordering of the points being drawn - for example, here it would be a shame to loose the boys eye being drawn first). The other way would be adjusting the existing animate stroke script to include drawing a follow path object as it reveals the path.. I don't know if this is even possible as it is using curve exposure to accomplish its task.