using “Create Outlines” to write text

[Steve Roberts]

You need to draw masks (applied to a solid) that follow the text, apply stroke to those masks, and use that solid as a track matte over the unaltered text layer in AE.

Stroking masks only works from strokes in AI, not fills. So if you try to copy from AI, and stroke the resulting masks in AE, you’ll get strokes around the text. Not filling the text.

[Whitlock Dunbar]

That’s exactly what’s happening, the stroke is following the path not filling it.

I’m not trying to be lazy, just efficient here. If I use the shape layer generated by “create outlines”, isn’t there some way to keyframe the Fill parameter? I tried using “Trim Paths” but it fills outside the shape.

[Steve Roberts]

Keyframe the fill from where to where? A filled shape that looks like a long noodle doesn’t know where the noodle starts and ends — it just knows it’s a filled shape, a blob. It doesn’t know that the fill should start from here and go to there. Only masks know where they begin and end, and that’s because they are paths, a series of points connected by lines, starting from the “first vertex”… I’m talking about the mask line, not the shape contained by the mask.

Since fonts don’t include any “how-to-write-it-on” data (and probably never will), each stroke of the text is a directionless noodle. Any direction is in our minds as we read from left to right, mostly.

But let’s say, once you’ve converted the shape to outlines, you could specify where a fill starts and ends on the noodle-like shape (a feature suggestion). You’d probably have to draw a vector along the shape, kind of like the way you draw a vector to tell a morphing app how to morph from here to there…. or the way you make a gradient fill in Photoshop. This vector would have a start and end point, allowing the app to know which way to animate the fill. You’d have to do this for each shape though, each noodle.

Which would take just as much time as drawing masks and using strokes as track mattes. 🙂

The only advantage of my proposed method (you listening, Adobe?) over the stroke/matte is that my method might allow for variation of noodle width. This can be a problem with noodles that go from thick to thin and are close to other noodles. Hm.

Anybody else?

[Mike Clasby]

If you want to write it on like a signature, see Aharon’s tut, here:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/animating_signature.php

Aharon’s tut is probably close to what you want if you take that layer that was produced by Create outlines, change the solid’s color to the color of the writing you want, the add Stroke, All Masks, and change that last parameter, “Paint Style” from the default “On Original Image to “Reveal Original Image”. But… it probably won’t look like you want because the Create Outlines command generates masks in a different order than what you need to make the animation flow like it was written naturally. Those masks are probably out of order.

Andrew does a similar thing, here:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=25

And Jayse does the Mother-Of-All_Write-Ons, here:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/hansen_jaysen/growing.php

There are no quick ways I know of, and I’m sure such a plugin would sell like hotcakes.

Alternatively, I suppose you could just take that layer that was produced by Create outlines, change the solid’s color to the color of the writing you want, then reveal it with a black solid above. Of course this doesn’t look like the tuts, but if you mask the solid with a wedge mask to match the slant of Porcelain, then it’s not as awkward a cheat.

[Mike Clasby]

Ooops…

Using Stroke, with “Reveal Original Image” as above, you’d also need to adjust the “Brush Size” upwards until you get the reveal you want, otherwise it just looks like outlines.

[Whitlock Dunbar]

Thanks for the help everyone. Porcelain is such a bear of a font to write on because of all the strokes and the wide range of widths; I was somehow hoping there may be a shortcut. I wasted a lot of time trying to get create outlines to work, so I had to go with the down and dirty stroke plug-in to meet my deadline.

Back to Steve’s question, it just seemed in my apparently flawed logic that once I created a shape layer (via create outline) I should be able to set a keyframe for fill set to 0% and another to 100%. For simplicity sake picture a typical progress bar; 0% would be empty (ie no fill) and 100% would be full.

Don’t worry about explaining why this isn’t possible, I have accepted that it isn’t and have moved on to greener pastures. Thanks again though!

[Steve Roberts]

I can see the 0-100% fill happening over the entire shape, like animating its overall opacity, but making that fill follow a direction like the filling of a vessel … that would be nice, but it ani’t happenin’. Hey, if font designers started including the necessary write-on data with their fonts, I’d be a happy camper too. But Adobe and others would have to change the standard, and that ain’t gonna happen since their biggest customers are print designers, and they don’t need write-on data.

Just can’t shut me up, eh? 😉