Paint-on Animation with Boris RED

RED's vector paint is very fast and easy to use, even though it offers a wide variety of features not found in other vector paint tools. These include fill, multiple strokes, and a much wider range of animatable parameters, such as color, brush size and opacity. The Brush tab illustrated below will give you a small idea of what I mean, although even this barely hints at the unique power of vector animation in Boris Red.

One of the easiest and most useful things to do with vector paint is to simulate handwriting.

This effect works by animating vector paint as a mask over text. It helps to start with a font that looks something like handwriting, and I've provided one for you here, called Engrossing. Download the appropriate version, decompress, and install it. Included with each platform's font is a setting for you to view the finished effect, but you'll need to install the font first. Install the font first, or the setting won't work.

[WinFontSetting.zip and MacFontSetting.sit]

There's a complete rundown on how to create paint-on animations in the Red manual's tutorials. Like all of the tutorials there, I highly recommend that you do this one. I'll provide a quick refresher here, and add a few steps to polish it up.

A Little Background
Before beginning to create this effect in the Boris Red Engine, I created a gradient track to use as my background. As you could see in the movie, I set the angle of the gradient to negative 120 degrees, and made the black color stop a little lighter. I manually typed in RGB values of 50, 50, 50, but you can also use the eyedropper or the color picker. There's no reason you can't do this effect over any background you like, but I enjoy how it looks over a gradient. You might also want to set your interpolation to constant, using the Constant Interpolation button on the bottom of the controls window.

Set the duration of the effect to three seconds, and let's begin.

Step 1: The Text
Most of the tutorials I've done focus on the power of Red (and Graffiti 2) to create native vector text, but in this case, we're going to use a bitmapped, or pixel-based layer. One of the differences between the two shapes, 3D Line Art (vectors) and 3D Plane (pixels) is that only the 3D Plane has an upstream face, which we'll need for a filter effect later on. So for now, instead of the blue T icon, press the Text Page button in the timeline.

If you've installed "Engrossing," it should show up in your font menu. Select that font, make the size 132, and type the word "engrossing" in all lower case letters. I like this font quite a bit, but I'm absolutely crazy about the lower case "e." I discoveRed this after I noted that, ironically enough, my LEAST favorite character is the upper case "e."

To change the color, select the text, and go to the Color tab in the Text window. The reason why you need to highlight text before change the color is that actions in the text window apply to selections. That's how you're able to create text with multiple sizes, styles, and colors in the same text page (or even the same word). You can use the standard OS shortcut for Select All.

However, selecting the text inverts the colors, making it tricky to see the color you're applying. So here's a tip: click in the Opacity box in the bottom half of the Text window. That's all, just a click. This is enough to activate the lower half of the window, so that, instead of a reverse box, the text is now selected with a clear box.

Why the two kinds of selection indicators? When the selection box is reversed, any typing will affect the selected text. In this state, pressing the Tab key will move text to the next tab. When the selection box is clear, any typing pertains to the parameters in the lower half of the window: pressing the tab key moves you between parameters.

Now use the color picker to select an aqua color, and you'll be able to see the change right away. Close the Text window to apply the title. Move the engrossing trade to the top of the timeline if it's not there already.

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