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MOTION PAINT – SIGNATURES
I’ve recently upgraded to motion 3 and have been trying to animate a signature using paint into my project. I’ve been using a graphics tablet but all of my attempts to draw a proper signature have come back looking stilted and childish. (same goes for everyone else who tried in the office)
Under no circumstances have we been able to replicate a signature that looks ANYTHING like our normal ones in paint. I understand there are endless variables in the prefs. but it’s not like we’re trying to re-invent the wheel here. Surely apple had this sort of thing in mind and they can’t have made it that un-user friendly.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this properly? Or is there a way to trace an existing signature and animate it somehow? (with behaviors or keyframes? )
thanks in advance. shawn
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1 Reply
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Shawn – I just tried to post and I don’t think it went through, so I apologize if this goes on here twice. Here is a pretty simple way to animate a signature: First, you need a graphic of the signature. If you can scan this in or build it in another program that will work. There are even fonts that are pretty close to some handwriting. Regardless, once you have the graphic of the signature, add it to the canvas. Then take paint stroke tool and make a crude click-by-click of how the signature should be drawn on (start at the left and click your way through the whole thing – you can use bezier curves to make it match closely, but this isn’t really that important – just make the shape pretty similar to your graphic). Make sure that ‘write on’ is selected for the paint shape. Increase the brush width until it covers the entire signature.
Then add an image mask to the signature layer (object -> add image mask). Drop the paint shape into the image well for the mask and you should be good to go. To retime the writing just change the write on behavior in the original shape. Hope this helps.
–Michael
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