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Deleting Strokes

There are two ways you can delete paint strokes.

To delete any individual stroke, do the following:

1 Select the Paint node.

2 Click the Modifiers tab.

3 Right-click over the Stroke header you want to delete and choose Delete from the menu.

To delete all paint strokes you’ve made on every frame, do one of the following:

— Click the reset button in the upper-right corner of the Inspector.

— Delete the Paint node in the Node Editor.


Animating and Tracking Paint Strokes

In some ways, animating paint strokes is no different than animating any other effect in the Inspector.

Each parameter that can be animated includes a gray diamond Keyframe button along the right side. Clicking the Keyframe button sets a keyframe on the current frame and enables auto-keyframe mode for the parameter. However, more commonly, the paint stroke is tracked using one of Fusion’s trackers, or for motion graphics, animated using the Write-On Start and End sliders.

Animating with Write-On Controls

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The Stroke and Polyline stroke types include Write-On controls located in the Stroke controls section of the Inspector. These Write-On controls animate the appearance of a stroke along the path. You can animate the Write-On controls using either the Stroke Animation drop-down menu or using the Start and End sliders.

Stroke Animation Drop-Down Menu

The Stroke Animation drop-down menu includes six options for auto-animating a paint stroke.

The first two options do not truly animate the stroke as much as set a duration. The Limited Duration option uses the Duration slider to set the number of frames the stroke is onscreen.

To auto-animate the stroke, you can choose one of the three Write options or the Trail option.

Choosing Write On automatically creates a write-on animation. The duration is set by two keyframes that get added when you choose Write On from the menu. The Start keyframe is set on the frame where you first created the stroke. The End keyframe is added on the current frame when you choose Write On from the menu. The remaining options in the menu set their Start and End keyframes similarly but change the direction of the animation based on the menu selection.

Write-On Start and End Parameters

The Write-On Start and End parameters allow you to manually control the start point and end point along any stroke’s path, and use keyframes to animate each parameter individually. The Start

parameter determines the point at which the stroke begins, measured as a percentage offset from the beginning of the stroke’s path. For example, a Start value of 50 moves the starting point of the stroke to the middle of the stroke’s path. The End parameter works the same way but from the other end of the stroke. You can animate a stroke onscreen, creating a handwriting effect by setting keyframes for the End parameter from 0 to 100 over several frames.