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Inspiring
January 12, 2021
Question

Drawing hand animation - transform by trim paths

  • January 12, 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 608 views

I have have seen some animations where a 'hand' holding a pencil - or rather a photographic layer or a hand holding a pencil, appears to sketch out some linework. Obviously this can be done with just keyframing the transform of the layer alongside revealing the lines with 'trim paths'. But I wondered if there's a more clever way of linking that layer to the end of the trim paths reveal, so that the 'pencil' or whatever image you use, follows right on the end of the trimmed path?

Or is there an entirely different method for doing this that I'm missing?

Attached is the kind of thing I mean, it's just if the line drawings were much more complicated than this the keyframing of the hand would become very labourious!

Maybe you can constrain a null to the path and have it travel along its length in sync, much like a 'path constraint' in 3D software?


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3 replies

Roland Kahlenberg
Legend
January 15, 2021

Automatic Whiteboard - https://aescripts.com/automatic-whiteboard/ looks useful and it comes with a Trial Version.

Very Advanced After Effects Training | Adaptive & Responsive Toolkits | Intelligent Design Assets (IDAs) | MoGraph Design System DEV
P.M.B
Legend
January 13, 2021

The simplified solution (assuming i understand the question) is just copy past the path data to the position of the "hand" layer.  I've attached a very basic video showing how.  Depending on the complexity or number of paths the process may need to be repeated on multiple layers or hold keyframes may need to be inserted into hands animation to make it looka little more like natural writing.   All I'm doing in the video is selecting the path, hitting CTRL C to copy and the CTRL V to paste that info onto the position layer of the hand image.  Then I align the initial keyfram and, selecting alll the keyframes I hold down the ALT key and drag the keyframes out to match the duration of the trim path key frames.  Hope that makes sense

https://vimeo.com/500047429

 

It should be noted that in the video you provided the hand is not accurately following the drawing.  It's just moving around the areas as they're being revealed and because it's happening quickly it gives a "good enough" illusion that the hand is drawing it on.  The brain sees what it THINKS it shoud be seeing.  This is something to keep in mind when creating visual content, often "close enough" is more than enough because the brain is easily tricked

~Gutterfish
Inspiring
January 15, 2021

Thanks, I think you're right and I'm over thinking things a bit. Keying the drawing hand 'manually' is probably going to best.

That's a neat trick though, not sure it would neccesarily work in my scenario as the image is going to be formed by a series of images, probably formed from a raster image with the 'auto-trace' feature which produces a series of masks. However the reveals will be so fast that I can probably play it fairly fast and loose with the hand's adherance to the line

P.M.B
Legend
January 15, 2021

Yah my example was a very simple example of how to have a point follow a path.  You specifically asked about trim paths, so...

In a more complicated image you would have to use several different layers of the hand image edited together.

But there are other methods, like using the paint tool to reveal the image which would be alot easier than using auto trace which cretaes tons of masks.  And there are lots of tutorials on Youtube with different methods on how to do it.  Looks like you found one.

~Gutterfish
Mylenium
Legend
January 13, 2021

You can attach layers to paths using rather convoluted and ugly expression code, but unless your "writing" is super smooth that won't do you much good, as it may look terribly choppy and you would need to re-rig it for every separate path segment, anyway. And technically that's not how you write with ink and pen, anyway. Other than that AE has no proper constraints. It's all custom expression code, sometimes packaged into scripts. You may find some useful helpers on AEScripts.com if you feel so inclined, but otherwise an excursion to the online help's expression section might enlighten you.

 

Mylenium