How to make an animation where it appears like a curve is being drawn?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I guess this is really 2 questions:

  1. if I have a curve, how do I give it “width”? So like the curve looks like it’s drawn with thick marker rather than a thin pen?

  2. How do I make it appear to be being drawn? So like at frame 0, there is just a single point, and at frame 100 the whole curve is drawn. Obviously, at Frame 50, it would be half drawn, etc. Does this have to be done via python? If so, I’ll ask over there.

Thanks.

2
  1. if I have a curve, how do I give it “width”? So like the curve looks like it’s drawn with thick marker rather than a thin pen?
    In the curve properties set an extrude value or Bevel Depth in the Geometry panel.
  1. How do I make it appear to be being drawn? So like at frame 0, there is just a single point, and at frame 100 the whole curve is drawn. Obviously, at Frame 50, it would be half drawn, etc. Does this have to be done via python? If so, I’ll ask over there.
    Set a bevel depth and keyframe the End Bevel Factor from 0 to 1 (see attached blend file)

Does this have to be done via python? If so, I’ll ask over there.
Please don’t cross post, it’s bad manners!

Attachments

curve.blend (177 KB)

3

I appreciate the example. The problem, however, is that I don’t want it get 3 dimensional. So if I have a curve on the XY plane, I don’t want it to extrude or bevel into the Z dimension. I’d like for it to just become wider on the XY plane. So for example, if the “curve” was a line from (0,0) to (10,0), and I wanted my “marker” width=2, then the resulting shape would be a 10 by 2 rectangle with the top left corner at (0,1).

Sorry, but what do you mean? I’m not sure what corss posting is.

4

Ok… so I got this to work. What I did was to make a straight, but short, horizontal brazier curve and made that the bevel object of my main curve. Then I did what you said for the animation part. And it works like a champ. I appreciate the help. I wanted to mark this as “solved” but I’m not sure how.

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To mark a thread as solved, edit your first post, go to Advanced. You’ll see a dropdown menu labelled “Prefix”. Change from nothing to [Solved]. Save your post. That’s all.

6

Thanks! The online support for Blender is great. It’s a big reason I chose blender. Hopefully soon I will be able to answer other people’s questions rather than merely ask them.