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creating animated calligraphy strokes in AE
Hi,
I need to build an animated Chinese calligraphy word in AE for a client. It needs to follow the strokes in 4 Chinese characters. The effects I’m trying to get are similar to the brush strokes in “Mummy 3” title made by Imaginary Forces. So each stroke is being written onto the screen.
https://www.trapcode.com/gallery/mummy3_h.mov
I made my own version of it by tracing the shapes of the scanned image of those letters in illustrator. Then import every single stroke in vector shape into AE. Then adding animated mask to each stroke so they look like it’s being written on the screen(strokes gradually reveal).
https://www.shaunau.com/archive/worldfrequency.html
It’s a very time and labor intensive process. When you have many words to animate such as a film title. This process is nearly impossible. So I’m wondering if there is a better approach. I’m pretty sure Imaginary Forces used a different and more effective way to do it.
Can anyone help?
Thanks.
Shaun
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1 Reply
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Search the COW for “signature”.
The best way I’ve found is to use the Stroke effect (in a track matte) applied to “skeletal” open (two-vertex) masks — one line for each stroke of the character. The stroke layer reveals the Chinese character layer underneath. Make the stroke fat enough to reveal the entire width of each character stroke. You could also use Trapcode’s 3D stroke.
Does that make sense?
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