i've been a big fan of mk12 for years, and have always wondered how they make that ink-like or ribbon-like lines "draw" on-screen. they also do a great "onscreen draw" with letters and words. i can't imagine this is all done by hand (masking?). is this a great plug-in(s)?

http://media2.mk12.com/mk12_version_five.html

good examples in the 2006 reel, but particularly in the "Ultralove Ninja" piece, 2002 on the right...the way things "grow"...

yeah, mk12 are the sh*t. they're obviously very able motion graphic designers with good 3d and cg skills. i used to try to take a look at everything they put out but forgot about them recently. thanks for the link.

a lot of their ribbon-type work is done in 3d, which app i couldn't tell you. i've done similar types of effects by exporting complex paths from illustrator, bringing them into 3ds max, and using a path deform for a 3d object on the illustrator path.

some of the more angular looks could be achieved by animating the text reveals in a 2d app, exporting the video, and mapping onto a 3d surface comprised of boxes, and rendering the final video out from the 3d app. any compositing app with native 3d space, like after effects or combustion, should be able to do some similar effects as well.

regarding the ultralove ninja piece, it seems to be layer on layer of 2d and 3d image sequences converted to emulate watercolor. i'm not sure what they used for the watercolor conversion ... probably a combination of a filters/plugins, with some heavy manual tweaking. my guess is the growth effects are done by hand frame-by-frame, or they used images generated from a 3d app.

one final note, generating animated masks for 40 individual layers and doing a frame-by-frame animation may sound daunting, but once you get in a groove, it's not so bad. and the effort will show ... as opposed to using a canned look from a plugin.

those flying 3d ribbons can be done with after effects.. but for the life of me, i cannot remember the bloody name of it.. twixtor maybe??? GAWD!!!

A lot of the effect can be done in 2d, and probably can be reiterated over 3d layers in AE. I haven't seen much of the mk12 guys' stuff, but I found this tutorial a while back that's a very simplified 2d version of the "growing" effect.

http://www.creativecow.net/show.php?page=/articles/hansen_jaysen/growing/index.html

Will,

Thanks for the link. This one's a keeper.

Oh my, that's good. Thanks Will.

great link! thanks for posting that. the 2D, i'm ok with, but the 3D at this point, is out of my relm.

thanks for the responses guys!

eric