Essential Natron Plugins for Motion Graphics

Hello Everyone,

I’m new to the Natron community and this is my first post here. I have known about Natron for quite some years now and have been using on and off, usually for compositing purposes.

Now I am interested in the Motion Graphics potential of Natron. Currently, I have all the community plugins installed.

So my question to all the motion designers here, which nodes and plugins in Natron are indispensable for Motion Graphics? And recommended plugins catered towards motion graphics?

Thanks and Regards,
Daulat

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Hi,

Depends on what you want to do (in motion graphics). I have being doing a lot of motion graphics lately through work, and I have no need for additional plugin in Natron.

I recommend @NodeMonkey 's YouTube channel if you need tutorials.

By motion Graphics, I mostly want to do typographic animations like kinetic topography, and maybe something like a Trim path plugin in AE, which can be used to sorta simulate writing animations, and such.
An example that I’m trying to recreate : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fsH8qxDDY4

Thanks for the link.

Ooo, I like that curiosity intro. I’ve been considering doing a graph similar to that in Natron. Unfortunately my YouTube channel is still around two and a half months behind the live streams, and for the next few weeks we are addressing Noise Reduction (Monday we’re building a temporal noise reduction system), while the YouTube channel is still back finishing up the puppet animation series. With that said and knowing people are often impatient for solutions, my self included. :wink: There are several potential approaches to this.

The first thing to tackle is how one intends to draw the text. One potential approach is to use the technique used in writing with light tutorial that is on my YouTube channel. That would produce an organic, truly hand written set of words ( so long as one wasn’t live streaming and used a drawing tablet vs a mouse :wink: ); however, that is also meant to capture imperfections as if same one were drawing with a flashlight over time.

A second approach is to use either Rotodraw (paint) or Roto(sculpt) node for the writing, depending on which one chose they would draw or sculpt out the words. For the Rotodraw node one would first go to the general tab switch the lifetime from single frame to all, and on the stroke frame set the visible portion end to 0 and key that, then move out in time to the point where the words would be fully revealed and set the visible portion end to 1. Go back to frame 1 and hit play and the words will all draw over the time range. For the Roto node one would sculpt out a shape over time (in my opinion this is better for the next option)

The problem with the above two methods is they only make hand written words. For fonts the technique would be done in a similar fashion to the second method, except that we would traceor roto sculpt around the font it self with our paint/drawing or bezier path/shape and if drawing a brush wide enough to contain it. Then use the drawing/path/shape as a mask to reveal the underlying font. If keyed in the same way as in method 2 this will make the font reveal it self over time.

The edge effects as it draws can be done in multiple ways as well. If it were me I would likely alter the masks leading edge with a procedural noise pattern; however, if one used bezier curves for the font reveal mask they could animate all the individual elements altering the shape over time. The little splashes would be additional bezier animations.

This is a very loose guild to steps one will have to play with these options to figure out if any of these work for them. Also there are other ways to do this as well, but most would involve more complex node graphs.