Today’s post shows off a slight modification of yesterday’s size modulated text brush effect. Rather than using a horizontal grid tiling pattern for the text brush overlay painting, we use path start regionization to fill each of the flat color regions generated by the vectorizer with a outline fill patterning for the text overlay.
The paint action sequence (PASeq) used for today’s effect is very similar to yesterday’s. It’s based the same 5 action steps. The particular paint synthesizer action step was modified from the one used in yesterday’s PASeq to generate the outline fill scan patterning used in today’s example.
In yesterday’s post we used a Rectangle Grid Scan option for the Path Start control panel Generator parameter. This generated the regular horizontal text layout seen in yesterday’s effect. For today’s post, I wanted to modify the way the black text overlay was painted into the canvas. To do this, I switched the Path Start Generator to use the Flat Region Canvas as Regions option.
This path start Generator option intelligently analyzes the canvas, and generates a path start position for each flat color region in the current canvas. Any of the different Path Start Regionization Generator option also can be used with a special Path Start Regionize option for the Path Type in the Path Shape control panel. This Path Type option allows for intelligent painting of each analyzed path start region.
The Region Pattern Type parameter determines how the individual analyzed path start regions are filled in. I selected the Outline Fill option to generate the circular fill patterns seen in the finished effect example at the top of the post.
The Region Pattern Spacing determines the spacing between 2 concentric outline fills. I set it to 20 to get the text spacing shown in the final effect above. Depending on your source brush size, you typically need to adjust this parameter to get the appropriate spacing you want for your outline fill patterning.
You could either rebuild the overall PASeq preset from scratch, or you could edit the one we used in yesterday’s example. I choose to do the latter. After editing the paint synthesizer by hand as described above, I then recorded my changes into the 3rd AutoPaint action step in yesterday’s PASeq. To do this, I option clicked on the red keyframe for the 3rd AutoPaint action step located at frame time 1.
I could have also used one of the context menu commands associated with the individual PASeq action steps to make the edit. To do this, you select the action step you want to edit, and then click on it while holding down the control key on a mac (right click on windows) to bring up the context menu commands (2nd gallery image above). The particular context menu command you would run would be the Interface to Action Step menu command. This takes the current Editor interface settings associated with the clicked action step and records them into the action step.
Using the context menu command to the the action step edit also allows you to change the current layer recorded into the edited action step. Option clicking a keyframe cell will record the edited a parameter changes into that keyframe but will not change the recorded layer information associated with the action step.
The PASeq preset used to generate today’s effect is 6-6-.paseq
