| In this tutorial you will really need to go by your own feel for the settings. The settings that I used are just a guideline. I first start out with a new image background of any color, and I apply my text at one end. Make sure you start out with a wide enough background so you can blend your text away before you run off the end (like I did as you will see at the end of this tutorial). |
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Now I will use the smudge tool to blend my text to the right and off the page (hoping to blend it away before I reach the edge). For this one I started out with settings at; Shape=round, Size=5, Hardness=5, Opacity=5, Step=25, Density=100. The important settings here were the Hardness, and Opacity. These are the settings that I varied throughout. Save your image before each setting change. I saved mine as numerical names (i.e. streak1...streak18). |
| Here I increased the Opacity by about 10 (Opacity now=15), and I kept increasing it by 10 to 15. I may make 10 or more strokes with the smudge tool and save my image, then change my settings again. Remember to save before each setting change. If you have too many images when you go to animate you can delete the frames you don't need in the transition when you are in Animation Shop. |
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After I reached a Opacity setting of about 50, I began to increase my Hardness setting by about 10 to 20 (on this image I don't think I set it higher than 50, but that is not saying you might need to go that high). If your image is not blending away fast enough you can use the spray can/airbrush tool on a very light setting to mist away the tail of your text. It is a good way to add a little more of your background color in so you can blend it into your streaking text. |
| As you can see here, I really could have used an extra 20 to 50 pixels extra on the end of my background. I could have also made my text smaller or used a font that wasn't so thick. You can plan ahead a little better than I did on this one. I finally ended on this one and got ready to open Animation Shop. |
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| Go to Animation Shop In Animation Shop I almost always use the Animation Wizard. It is just so easy. I set dimensions=same size as the first image frame (all my frames are going to be the same size anyway). The default canvas color set=transparent (you are not going to see it anyway since all the frames are the same size). At the next prompt I choose centered in the frame and fill with canvas color. The next prompt I choose Yes, repeat the animation indefinately and display frame=10 (actually in 1/100ths of a second, or here it would be 10/100 or 1/10th of a second). The final prompt will let you browse your drive for your image files, allow you to add them and move them arround into proper sequence. If you need to you can move them once Animation Shop opens them into a strip, but it is much easier to organize them here. Once you have your strip of images, watch the animation and make editing changes as needed (i.e. delete unnecessary frames, speed frames up or slow them down, resize total animation...), then save. |
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Here's a different color version.
