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How to make tracing animation for texts using arbitrary font? Basically I want to do something like below:

enter image description here

As shown in the image, I want to trace the strokes, NOT outlines.

Leon Cheung
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  • So it would be acceptable to have some letters to be on one baseline and other characters to be on another? The A is taller then B and C. GIMP can stroke curves. Perhaps Inkscape do more more. Blender can deliver the outlines itself. – atomicbezierslinger Jan 07 '16 at 05:56
  • Oh the taller A is just made for illustration. What I really want is to "extract" the stroke paths for making sort of painting-along-stroke animation. – Leon Cheung Jan 07 '16 at 08:39
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    related ? http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/28672/how-can-i-bake-an-animated-and-extruded-curve-to-a-mesh-animation – Chebhou Feb 27 '16 at 09:15
  • Use bezier curves to trace the letters and then use a cylinder (brush) with follow path attached and Dynamic Paint plane is the canvas. Create a paintmap down bottom of dynamic paint. I just made a cursive hand witting one other day – Mike Holmes Oct 14 '20 at 20:59

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You can try to use offset (bevel, extrude area ...) or to look for a font similar that does it, but I think the result will have to be edited a lot anyway for direction, points etc.

If you want to use this as paint/mask for a writing effect, I would do it this way:

  • grease pencil, manual place the strokes in order and direction that is convenient. (I doubt that you can actually get that too out of a font/offset)

I think is the most controllable way.. and grease pencil is kinda made for animated strokes

  • I use poly for convenience, may further use convert/bezier or so, you'll have to test your way
  • convert to curve with lots of options

  • use curve with options, with dyna paint or use it with addons (btrace, animation nodes etc) to generate your Alpha/mask...

  • if the text is very, very long (many lines) may want to make these into a blender font and then convert again to curves. But the process is worth only if you will use this template many times, for lot of text, imho.

An example. Note that for tracing, my path is not quite following your proposal, but more the way the paint will go.

enter image description here

PS: I post this as per comment where you say you use it to trace the text. Maybe that should be in the question too.

o.g.
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  • Yeah, I think heavy manual tweakings have to be done for every character unless we have a ready-to-use zero width font (even it's 0 width, some of them have to be seperated, because of more than one stroke...). (I just added an illusration image to show what I want to do. AN way? ;-] ) – Leon Cheung Feb 27 '16 at 04:45