Replies – Forums – Spencer Smith

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Spencer Smith
October 15, 2015 at 7:06 pm in reply to: Variable width stroke, without write-on effect

Some rigging/IK tools may be useful for this. I’m going to try DUIK. Thanks again for the help!
Spencer Smith
October 15, 2015 at 5:03 pm in reply to: Variable width stroke, without write-on effect

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I really appreciate the ideas. Distort effects aren’t going to give me enough freedom to control the motions. 3D stroke isn’t really that flexible either, imo, since it’s essentially distort effects in 3d space.

I’ve got a fair amount of experience working with the vector/shape tools in AE and am probably around upper-intermediate level in general. The vector tools simply aren’t that powerful from what I can tell and was wondering if a 3rd party tool or an expression-based approach could yield more control in animation and stroke width.

I guess my best option is to use 3d stroke to create tapered lines and restrict the artwork to paths that are stroked with linear increases and decreases in width. Still, there will be little control over the path/anchor point transformations over time…
Spencer Smith
October 14, 2015 at 10:43 pm in reply to: Variable width stroke, without write-on effect

On a related noted, is it possible to keyframe individual anchors? Path animation is not very flexible when you only have one keyframe for the entire path.
Spencer Smith
October 14, 2015 at 10:23 pm in reply to: Variable width stroke, without write-on effect

…This is my fear. Puppet warp would be good in principle if it would only behave. Are there and plugins that do it better?
Spencer Smith
October 14, 2015 at 8:29 pm in reply to: Variable width stroke, without write-on effect

Thanks for the ideas. Trapcode’s 3D stroke is too limited, I think, for the need. I’m also not trying to reveal segments of a stroke, but rather animate the motion of a line.

Imagine trying to animate movement of this line. For this example, say I wanted to animate the the left anchor to move up and down in an arc to make it look like the “tail” of the shape was wagging. The stroke would need to follow the path.

The overall goal is to animate something like this without having to control the anchor points on both sides of a solid shape, because that would be extremely tedious.