Scribble Effect?

[Andy Neil]

[Mark Spencer] “Be aware, Chris, that this behavior is pretty demanding on your system, especially if you have a lot of points.”

Or if you’re replicating a paint stroke which is already hard on the system.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Mark Spencer] “Very rare is it that I have something to offer beyond what you usually suggest Simon 🙂
Be aware, Chris, that this behavior is pretty demanding on your system, especially if you have a lot of points.”

Thanks, Mark – certainly not true at all but very nice of you to say so 😉

Incidentally, I am getting very smooth real-time playback with your wriggle shape suggestion – maybe my line doesn’t have that many points but it does seem to work very nicely as an overall effect.

Anyway, this is a good effect that I’ve just added to my library so thanks for the inspiration.

EDIT: Just to correct my previous recommendation to Chris, if you want more complexity you don’t have to make a second replicator just add a new line or lines to the first replicator which is a much more efficient way of doing it.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Chris Lehmann]

I’ve been using the Motion paint function extensively for the past few weeks and it can be incredibly powerful. Just one thing to look out for is if you are using A LOT of paint objects in one project, the file size will balloon to several hundred megs. I looked at the XML in the .motn file and it’s storing X/Y coordinates for thousands of vertices up to the 10th decimal point! For me this caused major slowdowns when working, and 2-4 second freezes during auto-saves.

I solved this by splitting the animation into smaller separate projects, but if anyone has any suggestions on how to speed this up I’d be very thankful.

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Chris Lehmann] “I’ve been using the Motion paint function extensively for the past few weeks and it can be incredibly powerful. Just one thing to look out for is if you are using A LOT of paint objects in one project, the file size will balloon to several hundred megs. I looked at the XML in the .motn file and it’s storing X/Y coordinates for thousands of vertices up to the 10th decimal point! For me this caused major slowdowns when working, and 2-4 second freezes during auto-saves. “

Make sure you check the smoothing checkbox in the Painstroke HUD before you start making loads of complex shapes. Without this turned on you will get an insane number of points, whereas if you enable smoothing you will get a bezier shape with massively fewer points.

You can see the difference from this example:

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Andy Neil]

Aside from breaking up the project, your best option is to manually clean up the excess control points. Even a simple paint stroke drawn from a tablet can have dozens of unneeded control points. Sadly, there’s no “reduce points” feature (which would be nice), but you can delete excess points and adjust your remaining point’s bezier handles to get the same look with half the number of control points. I also sometimes switch to b-spline points (depending on the look of the stroke) to get the number of points down as much as I can.

A good feature request would be button to have Motion clean up points automatically, leaving you with just some tweaking adjustments. Sort of like the reduce keyframes feature.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Andy Neil] “A good feature request would be button to have Motion clean up points automatically, leaving you with just some tweaking adjustments. Sort of like the reduce keyframes feature.”

Agreed.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Chris Lehmann]

I just did a quick test for masking characters and drawing them on screen. Turning on smoothing before drawing the mask with a tablet reduced the number of points from 2858 to 246! I don’t see any way of retroactively applying this (like a reduce points feature) but this will help a lot going forward. Thanks Simon!

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Chris Northcross] “I know that I can achieve a “scribble” type effect using After Effects. I’m curious if anyone knows of a way to do it in Motion 5? Thanks in advance for your help!”

Here’s a tutorial that shows how you can achieve this effect in Motion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTGf-TSS-hA

Hope that’s of interest.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

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