Handwriting Motion Graphics in Blender

1. Welcome to Handwriting MoGraph in Blender: If you're anything like me, you want to know how to do stuff like create motion graphics and blending. My name is Isaac Ramos and I'm an animator here to teach you how to create a special kind of motion graphics, revealing handwriting. This specialized skill is useful in unlimited fields and opens up a new world of possibilities. So if you're ready to up your Blender Game, come join me as we create handwriting motion graphics. In Blender. 2. Write Your Word: Hi there and welcome to another animation class. And this one is in Blender. Excited to be sharing this with you. I've been scouring the Internet trying to figure out exactly what I am about to show you how to do. And that is revealing handwriting in Blender. It's a super, super awesome and useful effect to be used and goes a long way. And whether you're working on projects for clients, you're just wanting to do something really neat and fun for yourself. But this is it going to be hugely invaluable for you as you work through this. So let's go ahead and jump right in. We're gonna get into it and we will get to, get to work on the project. So go ahead here, have open Blender. I'm going to open up 2D animation. And I'm going to go into object mode, hit X to delete, get rid of that object. Let's go to Edit Preferences. Want to make sure you have some of these things added on AD curve, extra objects and then add mesh. Mesh isn't as important right now. But just at for this time being, makes sure that you have AD curve at it on. For extra objects, there's the other one. If you want to do it, you can just type here in the search bar and it will become active as soon as you click on it. So that's great about Blender. To get started, let's go ahead and add, Shift a to add curve, Bezier curve. And then let's our X 90 that will rotate the object on that curve tab into edit mode. Let's x, and we're just going to delete that object for now. But in edit mode, makes sure that you're in edit mode. When you delete that object. From here, you're going to go ahead and click Draw. And this will be where you write out your little message. The longer it is, the more practice you will get. So I would recommend five to eight letters for this project. That could be hello, could be goodbye, goodbye seven. But whatever it is that you're wanting, and then just write it out. Okay. So looks like a huge mess right there. That's totally okay. It doesn't really matter for this particular project. Just makes sure that it's legible. That's the important thing here. If you left shift with your pinky and middle mouse click, you can drag your image around on the same plane. If you do just the middle mouse, you will go into 3D space. Just kinda keeps things going. Tab the Num pad with zeros. And you will go back to the camera view, the active camera view. So from here, I'm gonna go ahead and get to cleaning up my image a little bit. I want to get rid of this extra point right here. So exit out of the vertices. Wanted to make sure that I have some clean vertices to work with their right-click. Let's go to that handle type automatic. Throw it out a bit. So just be aware of that. And go ahead and clean up your writing to where you want it to be, finished, where it's ready to begin animating. We'll get to animating here pretty quickly. But for this first part, I want to make sure that we have everything ready to go. Blender is marketed as the all-in-one tool. And you find plenty of tutorials and how to do things in After Effects. Now to get these similar types of effects, but it's so hard to come across quality tutorials on particular things like what you might be trying to achieve. Like for me, I could not find anything about this specific skill. I had to piece together tons of different things just to get this one thing figured out. But makes a difference when you're there. Okay? Handle type. If you do a line that's going to keep them the same length, automatic puts on a different amount of weight, so you may not want that. That in mind. Let's move these over here. I want them to be there and we're gonna be adding weight to this line here soon. I like that. All right. Flip. I'll keep that as kind of a flare. Okay? You don't want a ton of vertices at this point because you don't know exactly what, what density you're gonna be working at for this. And that'll make sense here once we start adding weight. But go ahead, get your word. Whatever it is that you're writing. You could write your name, you could write hello. Hi, goodbye. Thanks, you're welcome, etc. Get whatever it is that you're going to write and refine it to the point where it looks great too. You work with the handles, make sure that everything is everything does need to be aligned. And I don't believe that if you right-click and just do it for everything, that everything will be aligned at that point. Well, I guess so it will. So you can do that as well. Just save yourself a little bit of a hassle there. That is, unless something is it a sharp corner, it needs to be aligned. If you want to do some of the, some of the different kinds of handwriting that is popular with the Brush, font and thick to thin. Not all the letters are attached or drawn in one stroke with those. So you can also separate your letters to get the exact style that you're wanting. That's totally fine too. Just make sure your letters are laid out the way that you want them to be written. And then we will get into adding some thickness to it and setting it up for animation. 3. Preparing for Animation: Hi there and welcome to another animation class. And this one is in Blender. Excited to be sharing this with you. I've been scouring the Internet trying to figure out exactly what I am about to show you how to do. And that is revealing handwriting in Blender. It's a super, super awesome and useful effect to be used and goes a long way. And whether you're working on projects for clients, you're just wanting to do something really neat and fun for yourself. But this is going to be hugely invaluable for you as you work through this. So let's go ahead and jump right in. We're going to get into it and we will get to, get to work on the project. So go ahead here, have open Blender. I'm going to open up 2D animation. And I'm going to go into object mode, hit X to delete, get rid of that object. Or let's go to Edit Preferences on to make sure you have some of these things added on AD curve, extra objects and then add mesh meshes and as important right now. But just for this time being, made sure that you have AD curve at it on. For extra objects, there's the other one. If you want to do it, you can just type here in the search bar and it will become active as soon as you click on it. So that's great about Blender. To get started, let's go ahead and add, Shift a to add curve, Bezier curve. And then let's our X 90 that will rotate the object on that curve tab into edit mode. Let's x, and we're just going to leave that object for now. But in edit mode, make sure that you're in edit mode. When you delete that object. From here, you're going to go ahead and click Draw. And this will be where you write out your little message. The longer it is, the more practice you will get. So I would recommend five to eight letters for this project. That could be hello, goodbye, goodbye seven. But whatever it is that you're wanting, and then just write it out. Okay. So looks like a huge mess right there. That's totally okay. Doesn't really matter for this particular project. Just make sure that it's legible. That's the important thing here. If you left shift with your pinky and middle mouse click, you can drag your image around on the same plane. If you do just the middle mouse, you will go into 3D space. Just kinda keeps things going. Tab the Num pad with a 0. And you will go back to the camera view, the active camera view. Okay, so from here, I'm gonna go ahead and get to cleaning up my image a little bit. I want to get rid of this extra point right here. So exit out of the vertices. Wanted to make sure that I have some clean vertices to work with their right-click. Let's go to that handled type automatic. Throw it out a bit. So just be aware of that. And go ahead and clean up your writing to where you want it to be, finished, where it's ready to begin animating. We'll get to animating here pretty quickly. But for this first part, I want to make sure that we have everything ready to go. Blender is marketed as the all-in-one tool. And you find plenty of tutorials on how to do things in After Effects. Now to get these similar types of effects, but it's so hard to come across quality tutorials on particular things like what you might be trying to achieve. Like for me, I could not find anything about this specific skill. I had to piece together tons of different things just to get this one thing figured out. But makes a difference when you're there. Okay? Handle type. If you do a line that's going to keep them the same length, automatic puts on a different amount of weight, so you may not want that. That in mind. Let's move these over here. I want them to be there and we're gonna be adding weight to this line here soon. I like that. All right. Flip. I'll keep that as kind of a flare. Okay? You don't want a ton of vertices at this point because you don't know exactly what, what density you're gonna be working at for this. And that'll make sense here once we start adding weight. But go ahead, get your word. Whatever it is that you're writing. You could write your name, you could write hello, you could write hi, goodbye. Thanks, you're welcome, etc. Get whatever it is that you're going to write and refine it to the point where it looks great too. You work with the handles, make sure that everything is everything does need to be aligned. And I don't believe that if you right-click and just do it for everything, that everything will be aligned at that point. Oh, well, I guess so it will. So you can do that as well. Just save yourself a little bit of a hassle there. That is, unless something is it a sharp corner, it needs to be aligned. If you want to do some of the, some of the different kinds of handwriting that is popular with the Brush, font and thick to thin. Not all the letters are attached or drawn in one stroke with those. So you can also separate your letters to get the exact style that you're wanting. That's totally fine too. Just make sure your letters are laid out the way that you want them to be written. And then we will get into adding some thickness to it and setting it up for animation. 4. Tweak and Add Shape: Alright, so now that you have that all set up to tab out of edit mode, and we're going to just be in object mode for a moment. Let's go ahead and add another Bezier curve, G to move it our X 90. All right, tab into edit mode. We're actually going to delete these. It's probably not necessary to rotate it before you do this, but that's just my personal workflow. Alright, add two points. Inter, you're done with your Bezier curve right there. This pin tool, it'll allow you to add weight to the object. I don't want to. So it's just a single click, single click to clicks. That's it. You're not looking for anything else. Alright? And if you ever find yourself kind of making an error in something, you can always right-click. Grab G to grab, right-click, we'll send it back to where it started. So right-click is the cancel button there. Let's do scale. Why not want yet, why? We'd be fine? And scale z 0, that will flatten them out, bring them back to each other. I'm going to tab out in object mode that origin, origin to geometry puts it right in the center of both vertices there. And that will actually be about all that we do with that. We will kinda play with it in a bit. But this is the really cool and fun part here where we get to start working with that. You're going to click on this, this curvy line with two vertices on it. This is your Object Data Properties tab. This is gonna be where we do a lot of the work from here. So geometry, you're going to want to scroll down. You can scroll down either using the scroll wheel or you can middle click the scroll wheel and then coming down here you're going to click Object, Object. Click on this one, Bezier curve one, and it throws it into a huge blob. This is not ideal. So this is where we will come back out and we will tab here we're not in edit mode. Keep in mind. Let's scale this down, it, down, all the way down and then our words come into focus. We could animate it exactly like this. If this is all the E1, That's perfect. That's great. You can start doing that and you can animate bottom to end, beginning to end, here all the way to the end and get that done. This is perfect. You just click on this where you want it to start at the very first frame here to the end. Then let's have it take five seconds. Change here to timeline. We'll go to frame, let's see, 24 times five. That'd be 121. Had a new frame there. If you don't want it to keyframe everything that you do, turn that off. Every little changes that you make will become a key and a keys, every aspect that changes there. So you want to make sure that you're not doing that because it can create a mess later on for other animation. Not as important for this one right here. But just keep that in mind. Okay? So now if you did that, there is our animation, plain and simple. That's it. You just animated your first word and looks like handwriting. So that's a really simple and easy way to do that. But you can do that. You can add all kinds of different weight. We're not going to worry about taper or the taper radius object, et cetera. Right now the important thing is that you've got this down. If you want it to be a different color, of course, you can come in, add a material and then put it whatever color you want it to be. It's a little minty lime green color right there. This turn off the render and turn off the visibility unless you want to change it. I'm just going to do this as the profile object. This will be hello. Great to get into naming your objects that we don't lose them, get confused about what something else might be or might be doing. This is a great way to do that and come to think of it now, looking at that curve, I don't like that a ton, so I'm going to actually get rid of this one right here. Alright, there we go. So that'll be how you play with it. So now if there's anything that you want to change with your word and the way that it looks right now as far as the actual script goes, go ahead and adjust that, makes sure that it is ready to go. Because the next video, we're going to be actually looking into how to add and change weight to each of your lines. So if you want this part to be thin, but this part to be thick, just to simulate what pressure is being applied by the pen, brush, or pencil. This will be where we do it here. So go ahead, make sure you have any other tweaks setup and ready to go and we will move forward from there. 5. Refine and Add Weight: Alright, so now that you have this tweet, the way that you want it to be. Let's go ahead and go in here and add weight. This is a really fun part right here. So let's go ahead and get into this. There's a lot to do here, a lot of tweaking and a lot of finessing. So this is definitely an important step. The trick here is to use Alt S. Alt S changes the weight of that one particular vertex. If you want it to be thin, of course you've got it to be shrunk all the way down. That makes a huge difference. If you just hit Scale, S is going to change the scale of the curve. You don't want it to change the scale of the curve. You want it to change the scale of the weight of that particular point in the curve. That makes a huge difference there as well. So if you want it, there's a lot of jaggedness here and you can see what's going on if you click into the wireframe shading, that makes a big difference there. You can click 2D or 3D. 2d or 3D just depends on the results that you're looking for. This is going to add resolution to your curves. So it's going to add more segments within, within the small space that you're trying to work in. So it could be great to do this. It goes up to 64, halfway there is, of course 32. The lower down you get, the less tweaking and refinement capability you have. You doesn't do anything That's a different, different parameter. Doesn't do anything in 2D space either. So I don't worry about it. At least not when working on this. So you can see more what's actually happening here. It's not visible with these overlapping vertices here or segments. When it's actually being written out. You can see they're just depending on where it falls. It just throws it in together. It's not really distinguishable. But try to get the smoothest path that you can so that it's actually appealing to look at when it's finished. You always want the best product possible as you're working through this. So I'm gonna go back to my rendered view. Materials view. Want to have that way there. And the reason you can't see the rest of these here is because it's not revealed yet. But you can't work on anything that isn't revealed. Adding some weight on the section here. And it disperses everything throughout from where that point is. Two the next point and from that point to the previous point. So keep in mind, there's a lot to tweak in order to get the result that you're looking for. And here's a good point as well. But when it's going backwards, you need to manually blend the weight between three points. You're not just doing 1 at a time, you are actually lending three points at a time. And it can get tedious. But it's a lot of really fine work, I should say. And that's not a bad thing at all, but it's just something to keep in mind for right here. I want to change the weight a little bit between these. It's too much space between them. So I'm gonna go in here and I'm going to click sub-divide. I right-click to bring this menu up. Click sub-divide and it puts one somewhere in the middle. Then I can change weight there. And then it blends a little bit better. From there to the next one. You can see there it's, it's working through to make it. And I think I want to do the same thing. This point, In this point, C here is a quick sketch. So this is one thing with this method where when there's too much difference between weights, if there is an overlap in them than it does not blend well. And you have to really get this dredged way out to figure that out. So it actually a good point to bring up right there. You either have to change the weight. You get it to work for you or you have to change the influence of the handles to do that, which actually is turning into something that I like and is working in the better for me. I may not need this vertex right there. I'm gonna do that and then I'm just going to pull this handle out. If you have any experience with working with vectors like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape or something along those lines. That is going to be extremely helpful as you work through this. It's the same mentality and kinda thought process as going in and designing vectors for a client, or again for yourself. Alt S to scale on those. Again, I want to add some resolution here, so I'm going to add that segment. Wanted to be a thinner line weight ale. I'm fine with it being quite a bit thinner there because it's really light upward brush stroke. And let's add some weight here. I'm going to add some here, but I don't want it to be at Ton. Again, you don't want this to be two extremely dense because it'll cause pinching like that. And the pinching is what makes it look, look less appealing. Flesh this out and you can see again what the handles do. When you're actually stretching it out. You're actually decompressing the vertices. There are the segments, segments within that. So that's, that's really, really useful there. This one want this to appear sharper, not incredibly sharp. And actually, there we go, that's more looking like what I want. Okay, That's much better. And it goes around is again, the inner for a lighter upstroke on the brush. It's going to start pressing as it slows down to come down and around. Heavy there. Move this one out this way. Week. I'm still getting roughly the same shape. Come in and do that right there. On down the way they're there, makes sure it still looks good. I like it. Okay, here we go. My new little bit more weight there. Okay, so here is a pro tip. If you want this tip to be a little bit more rounded, you can right-click, sub-divide. Right-click between these, sub-divide. Right-click between these and sub-divide. Then you can actually go back and delete those vertices one more time. And then these a bit, it throws off the weight when you do it this way. But you'll see why I do it this way here in just a moment. I'm actually going to scale this way down, so it has hardly any influence over the vertices behind it. And then I'm going to take the weight of the handle down like that. And then I'm going to take this, I'm going to push it way to the edge. Right there. It actually gives it more of a rounded tip. So it's not such a harsh finish. And you can do the same thing with the beginning. As it feels kind of like a downstroke. It can be heavier up to lighter. Here. I'm going to add some resolution right there. Thinner so it's consistent. Add one here. Heavier weight. In this is all about refining. When you take the weight here and you push it away, if it's feeling bunched up like that. It's because there's not enough, for lack of a better word, pressure pushing it, pushing the vertices in segments away from this point. So you take that handle, push it away and it's going to push more of the influence to the other vertex point. You can balance it out between them. That's what I like there. Do the same thing here, change the width all the way down and all the way down, but most of the way down. And let's scale the influence of the handles. Hey, down. Zoom in, looks a little bit messy so that handle their influence here. The influence of this handle is pushing beyond this vertex point. We actually need to pull it back a bit. There we go. Alright, there you have it. I'm going to tab out of object mode. All the way to beginning hello. It's a really effective tool to use paths using the start and end animation right there. If you want to go in and you want to tweak anything with the graph editor, you'll get some different speeds as you go through. The more dense a mess is in one section. One section, the more that it will push through or slowed down in that section, it rushes through larger areas. So if you want to play with the timing, you gotta go in and you gotta kinda tweak it as you want. But this is a really cool effect. Tig use for words to use as a reveal. You can use it for logos, you can use it for gift cards, whatever, or like a birthday cards, whatever it is that you wanna do, revealing a message. So go through, have fun with this, play with the weights, play with everything that we discussed. Always feel free to go back and re-watch any sections that you have questions on. But yeah, this is great and I really look forward to seeing what you put together. 6. Troubleshooting: Alright, so now for some troubleshooting tips, let's say that you are running right along. You're doing great. You love exactly how everything is turning out, but then you run into a major hiccup. Let's go ahead and add our curve, Bezier curve, having to edit mode delete vertices. Then I'm just going to write this in here with my drawing tablet. Actually, this is how I first noticed this issue. I'm just gonna get rid of that top dot doesn't really matter there. Then I am going to tab out of edit mode, add another Bezier curve. And alright, so at this point I'm setting my pen down. Everything looks exactly as it has with everything we've done so far. But the catch is, and comes when we actually come to this space to do this step right here and adding the geometry of Glick object Bezier curve. And now we see that the stroke has been applied sideways. I'm not sure exactly why blender does this, but it is something that we need to take into account. So I'm gonna go and scale this down. So I make my geometry a little bit thinner. I'm tab out that back in here, back into edit mode for your word. I'm just gonna go ahead and add a material to it. More visible. All right. Looking good. Tab into edit mode. On your control points menu, you're going to tilt right here, built and do 90 degree. Right? So that should get your geometry flat towards the camera, exactly as we've been practicing and working on. Just going straight through here and doing that. Another issue that I've found with this is that sometimes your geometry right here will be set off forward away from your points. So in that case, if that's to happen, again, I'm not sure exactly what it is that causes it. But if that happens, you can come here to geometry offset. And it will push your points away from the vertices that you have lined up here. If they are forward, then you're gonna go this direction. Actually, let's just pick. Let's see if we can break it a little bit. It's going to still want to do that. On occasion you'll find that Blender does something that you were expecting. But then again, also that you weren't. And it's not always easy to duplicate or replicate in issue. But just know that if, let's say this is the curve that we're working with. If this curve happens to be back here, when you click on this slider for geometry and click Offset, going to take your geometry and move it closer to your actual vertices and endpoints so that you can edit it. Normally. That's a huge help for anything that you are doing there and just makes a big difference in doing that. Then if you're wanting to add an I in your words and you are trying to add a dot. You can either draw the dot and put it in there as you normally would when we're doing this process. Or you can add a mesh object or scale it down. Tab into edit mode, hit F to fill the mesh. Back out. Add the material, the color, size it, how you want it to be. Then you have your dot, your dotted I. It's as simple as that way that I like to use it. Do dots on the eyes. It works perfectly fine. But you don't want it to be there the whole time as you are writing out your word. So if you're going to do that, you're going to want to make sure that you have the dot set at invisible and you're gonna do it here on the object properties tab. You can click on the viewport display. No visibility. And invisibility. You're going to turn off. Make sure you have correct object highlighted. Turn it off at the point that you want it. Let's say we want it to come in on frame 2122. I'm going to turn them on. And if your automatic keyframing is on, once you change that setting, it'll actually keep it for you. Then it automatically pops in as you're going through and writing out your words. That is quick and easy fix for that. Does the same thing as you normally would there. From frame two to frame 18, their frame that you have dotted your eyes. So that's another quick tip there. If you're having any issues with that, a great way to get in there and make a difference there. 7. Handwriting 3D Geometry: They finally, if you are wanting to apply this to a 3D effect, you're going to use very similar practices. Again, all of this is very similar in the way that it, you go about it. But there's a couple of things with, with 3D that are slightly different. So let's go ahead and instead of using an object that we're going to profile, if you want your letters to be round, you can just click around. That is totally fine with doing that. You don't need another object. However, if you want them to be a different shape, you will need to create that shape as a NURBS curve or something else. The Bezier curve, however, you want to do that. But this is the way to get your 3D letters. If you want them to be done like this. Very similar practice to how you would go through and smooth everything out. You're basically subdividing there between vertices. Let's go ahead and they'll caps. And you can see that it closes off the cap right there. You can see the difference there. But one thing that is interesting about this is that it does not, the tip isn't actually attached. So if you did go into sub-divide it and and make it finished, you're not you're not gonna be able to you don't even see anything there as it is. So if you were to, let's say you go in here and you sub-divide it, it's not going to do much for you. Like it's not going to round the tip because it's not attached. So let's go ahead and go here and we're going to apply a weld modifier. Bring it up above that, makes sure that that is on still. I did not have it on. Okay. There we go. So now the fill cap is attached. But it's got this weird geometry that's gonna make it a bumpy and goofy looking. So if you want to fix that, we're going to take the resolution and we're going to bump it all the way down to 0. Now we've got a couple of different other hiccups that we need to deal with here. But this is much more manageable than if we tried to have more geometry and get some of those funky deforms there. That just does not work with it, but it's still going to behave in a way that you can write with 3D geometry in a curve. Again, super useful here and very, very helpful. I wanted to write backward. So lots of things that you can do there. Again, if you want the tip of your letters to be enclosed in the 3D, you feel caps to the Modifiers. Add a weld modifier that attaches the tip to the mesh. And then you can click on sub-divide, smooth out your letters, and make it look wonderful. Again. So this whole object right here is only a curve. It is. Nothing else. It's not any actual 3D mesh or anything. It's just the curves that we're dealing with. It's not even, I'm not even any kind of geometry that we'd be able to use. We wanted to as though go ahead, have fun with how you are getting through this and just let it run, run wild with your imagination. But whatever you wanna do with this, the, really the sky is the limit. And this is a hugely, hugely invaluable tool for you to have in your arsenal with Blender. After Effects is typically what you would need to turn to to do something like this. But with this tool, you really are able to match a lot of what you can do in After Effects. And in a much simpler, in my opinion, way, then after effects achieves it. So hope that helps. It's really fun to play with all of these different techniques and variables, things like that. So just get after it and I would love to see what you post in the end. Api animating. 8. Post and Review: That was a really awesome class and hopefully one that you found a lot of value as you learned how to animate from beginning to end, how to design your word, how to add weight and add some thickness to align. In. All done completely in Blender. I was trying to use different vector programs and we import them into here and give them wait there, but it just wasn't working. Blender is an extremely powerful tool and one that you will be able to use her forever. You can use it for just about anything. And I hope that this gives you just one more tool in your tool belt to be able to quickly moving forward as you do any projects that you work on in professional work, your passion projects. Thank you so much. Please make sure to leave a review. Would love to see your projects and see what you do. And hope you'll join me for another class in the future.