[Filip Vandueren]

Perhaps it’s better to vectorize and organize the graphic into separate layers in Illustrator, would be better suited to do this than juggling all of this around in the timeline.

However; if there are a lot of overlapping characters, then how would those behave when they navigate the corner of a path? Should they stick together? That might look weird… the alternative is more illustrator work to separate everything into single characters…

Once you have everything set up as 1 character per layer (or shapegroup) in a correct layout of everything in 1 long line, then we can talk about what expressions would make the spacing in the path to be easy.

But there’s a lot of manual work first…

[Filip Vandueren]

I think Tom wants to use the shapes because he needs the design but doesn’t have the font.

[Filip Vandueren]

Using the path to Nulls script, with the 3rd option, you can create null objects which follow paths and orient themselves.

You would need 1 null per letter, and do the spacing by hand, once their relative spacing is set, you can add another slider to control them all at the same time with a simple expression.

Would that be an option ?

[Filip Vandueren]

Or this if you also want to counter any scaling that’s going on:

c=thisComp.activeCamera;
p=thisLayer.toWorld(thisLayer.transform.anchorPoint);
value * length(c.fromWorld(p)[2])/c.zoom * 100/scale[0];

[Filip Vandueren]

Try this expression on the stroke width:

c=thisComp.activeCamera;
p=thisLayer.toWorld(thisLayer.transform.anchorPoint);
value * length(c.fromWorld(p)[2])/c.zoom;

[Filip Vandueren]

BTW, in the latest version of After Effects you can enable “the snail” to inspect what expression or effect of what layer is slowing down rendering time the most.

[Filip Vandueren]

Are there maybe other expressions that are in turn also referencing the size of Rectangle Path 1 ?

If you know that an expression only actually needs to be evaluated once, because it would result in the same output each frame, you can start your expression with:

posterizeTime(0);

And it will not be calculated again and again while rendering. It will recalculate while you are working in the comp though, for example when you change the text, it will not be “locked” into the wrong previous value.

[Filip Vandueren]

And if the scale isn’t uniform, then this would work:

s=thisComp.layer(“Null_1”).transform.scale;
[10000/s[0], 10000/s[1]];

[Filip Vandueren]

Thanks,

Pastiche organizes dozens/hundreds of layers into a pattern based on another layer’s brightness or alpha, But it does it in a “harder” way

This method moves around a handful of layers randomly, but with a higher probability of them winding up at “dark” patches of the reference image. It’s the CC Time Blend Effect that actually “builds” the final image by accumulating all previous frames (like Echo, but faster and with less memory)

But in the end you only wind up with just the “afterimage” of what the layers made, not actually thousands of layers.

The final frame of my example movie has I believe the equivalent of 28.800 layers of text.

But you can’t then animate the layers to somewhere else for example. That would take thousands of “actual” layers, and it would probably kill After Effects or your CPU 🙂

[Filip Vandueren]

I have made an animation preset which helps with the process Andrei showcases.

Also working on a second version which is even compatible with text-animators.

here’s V1: https://we.tl/t-gI5DRRI0b9

https://imgur.com/9oRKx7R

demo of what v2 can do:

https://imgur.com/gallery/I7uVARU

quick demo of v2 of subSourceRect