Skip to main content
M
montana321
Known Participant
September 18, 2017
Answered

animating self-drawing line

  • September 18, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 19916 views

Anyone have any suggestions on the best way to go about animating a self-drawing line that takes several corners.

Trying to build an animation illustrating flow of electricity through a circuit which takes a very irregular, almost maze-like path.  Wasn't sure how to go about doing this.

Had been trying to motion tween it, but that was impractical.  Best way I figured out was to make a movie clip out of each straight leg of the circuit.  Animate that growing.  Then when the electricity takes a turn, make another movie clip on the next layer.  And so on until the entire circuit is lit up.  In addition to being rather tedious, it's unmanageable because of the number of wires and the layers required for each.

My other idea was a mask layer, but the shape the circuit takes is so weird I wasn't able to figure out a mask shape that I'd be able to move around create the effect of the wire growing on the layer underneath.

It's almost like I need to be able to record a brush stroke on a layer and mask with that.

Is there any feature in animate that I'm missing that would allow me to pull this off.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Colin Holgate

The easy solution to this problem is to create a mask layer that is exactly the shape to show the final image (if the image is itself a shape line you could duplicate the layer to get the mask), then make a keyframe and in the second frame delete some of the end of the mask, so that only the first 95% of the shapes shows. Do another keyframe, and delete some more. Keep going until eventually you can't see the masked object at all.

Now select the mask frames and right-click Reverse Frames. You'll then have a perfect mask to make the line appear as if it's drawing itself.

1 reply

Colin Holgate
Colin HolgateCorrect answer
Inspiring
September 18, 2017

The easy solution to this problem is to create a mask layer that is exactly the shape to show the final image (if the image is itself a shape line you could duplicate the layer to get the mask), then make a keyframe and in the second frame delete some of the end of the mask, so that only the first 95% of the shapes shows. Do another keyframe, and delete some more. Keep going until eventually you can't see the masked object at all.

Now select the mask frames and right-click Reverse Frames. You'll then have a perfect mask to make the line appear as if it's drawing itself.

M
montana321Author
Known Participant
September 19, 2017

I'll give that a try.  Any tricks to do I consistently so it's smooth action?

Not sure how practical this will be given the volume of wires I'm talking about (it's a circuitboard), but once you get into the groove might be okay.

Was hoping that there would be some feature buried in here that'd do it automatically.  I come form 3d where lofting along the percent of a path is routine.

However, the method I had scaling movie clips with motion tweens was an utter disaster.

Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices