Technique question

[Noah Kadner]

Why not just shoot something? It will look a lot less cheesy. Well at least from a technical standpoint…

Noah

[Bill Mcguire]

Maybe a duplicate layer for the bill, and a layer for the text, and adjust opacity…

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

Like Noah said, shooting this would probably get you the best look, though controlling the seeping would be an interesting challenge. The tricky bit about this is the look, not so much the animation. Paper, especially the kind used for currency, has a particular look it gets when it’s saturated with liquids. Combine that with the tricky color properties of up-close blood, and it gets more difficult. All that being said, if you’re willing to go through the heavy trial-and-error to get the look/color right, I can make a suggestion for the animation:

Use the replicator tool to create blobby text (not 3d blobs). There’s a write-up on it here: https://motionsmarts.com/tutorials/pain/pain1.html

By animating the feather of the replicator’s source shape (probably a circle), you can cause the blobs to spread from individual pinpoints into full-blown blotches. I’d use a few different replicators, layered together, because you don’t want all the blobs to grow at the same rate, plus you can fade them separately and use different blend modes. This won’t be speedy, because creating legible blob-text requires hundreds or thousands of replicator points (times the number of replicators). Here’s a quick example of three stages: https://www.motionsmarts.com/images/misc/murderbill.jpg

As you can see, though, the believability of the bottom stage isn’t too good, because the color/wetness is tricky to accurately reproduce. That’s where the elbow-grease comes in 😉

Hope this helps. Good luck with your project!

[Thecineaste]

That seems like a wonderful technique, I will try it. Actually, I should have been much more specific. It’s not a real dollar bill, it’s a drawing of one. This is for an animated short.

But your suggestion should work out great.

Thanks.