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Participant
July 7, 2026
Question

Procedural animation: How does one achieve this without manually animating everything?

  • July 7, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 12 views

I’m specifically trying to recreate this here where futuristic code seems to be eating away at the screen, this background loading animation is used in a few other places as well.

https://streamable.com/850t1s

What I can’t figure out is how they managed to,

  1. make the little ‘x’s change into another symbol, then to an ‘M’ symbol.
  2. have the symbols move around and eat away at the screen.

Is there a way to achieve this via expressions?

Bungie game studio released their game Marathon this March, with it some amazing animation styles worked on by brilliant people. I’ve been going through their in-game animations and there are a lot of things I can’t figure out how they managed to do, mostly the 2D stuff. 

 

1 reply

ShiveringCactus
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 7, 2026

Maybe search for “Matrix Code” tutorials and combine it with a wipe effects like this one:


Within the text animator options, there is a feature that allows you to switch out characters which is how most of the matrix tutorials do it.

Participant
July 7, 2026

I’ve thought of this initially as well, but the letters and the symbol aren’t actually characters, they seem to be designed icons. They have a rectangle with the letter in the middle, when you play around with the colors and decrease contrast and shadows, the borders pop up. 

I’m not sure if the wipe will work too, because the symbols are moving in specific directions instead of it being a reveal - I will give the wipe a shot though