Handwriting Animation

Hello, I am new to animation and I am currently working a small project for my brother to practice my skills.  I am wanting to animate a pen actually writing.  Can someone please point me in the right direction.  I am having a bit of trouble finding it on youtube.  Thank you.  

  • tanya (tanya53) replied

    This is how I did it and. there are many other ways to do it I assume.

    1.  create a pen model, I put a bone in it and animated that.  You could just animate the object, but I wanted to see what at armature was.

    2.  I used dynamic paint to have the writing appear as the pen moved.

    I used the tutorials here for dynamic paint and the pen was basically a cylinder modified.  You will need to animate the pen and the writing.  Don't get discouraged,  I have found that even my simple ideas. tend to be more complicated than I originally thought, but animation is great fun.  You should definitely do the animation classes,  Wayne is great.

  • Shannon (treecalledgroot) replied

    Thanks for the response tanya, really appreciate it :)  I just finished waynes animation course, I really enjoyed it.  Once I have finished this project I will tackle the animation boot camp.

    Thanks again!

  • Jonathan Lampel replied

    Another thing you could try is drawing with Grease Pencil and using the Build modifier - that looks like pretty convincing handwriting and is easy to animate! Then, you could probably duplicate the GP object, convert it to a curve, and animate the pen along the curve. 

  • Shannon (treecalledgroot) replied

    Thanks Jonathon, will give that a try next time!