Changing letter size and rotation for text effects

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Changing letter size and rotation for text effects

meggeki

I'm trying to achieve a similar effect to the text in Inscryption (video with timestamp for reference), which has multiple subtle visual effects - individual letters shake, by lightly increasing/decreasing in size and gently rotating left and right (in addition to that, a wave effect is used for some lines).

I'm suspecting that in Inscryption, which is made in Unity, such an effect is achieved through tools such as TextMeshPro which allows the program to treat each individual letter as a mesh, allowing for such detailed effects.

I'm currently struggling to think how would I approach making something like this in Godot.
A wave effect is easily accessible, but I'm struggling to find methods to manipulate size + rotation of individual characters.

Is that something possible to do currently, be it through custom BBCode with parameters I'm not aware of, or other methods? Maybe what I need will be currently easier to achieve through shaders?

Would love any input, thank you!

JusTiCe8

meggeki The effect you point using the video doesn't look like to need individual characters at all IMHO, it more looks like a nicely done pixel shader used on text in a way or another. Characters looks like to move individually, but it's not the case to me.

Anyway, you may be able to create a string of Sprite2D nodes for instance, one per letter and use tween on them to make anything you like, growing, shrinking, moving up and down in a wave, changing color... putting each string in its own scene, it would be not too heavy to manage. Tweens are so powerful for such little animations and effects, it's quite like Godot own shaders but a lot easier to deal with.

If you don't have that much strings, doing it manually is not too much time consuming, with a lots of strings however, helpers functions would be more than welcome. In such case, sharing the code would be great.

meggeki

JusTiCe8 I see, that would make sense too. I did note that in a lot of cases, same letters in a string (like E, A or T) would have identical effects compared to other letters, it's a subtle difference but led me to believe that the effects are applied per letter/letter type.

Either way, while trying to re-create it bit to bit would be cool, right now learning anything that comes even close is the goal.
So I'll try your suggestions using Sprites and Tweens, and see how the workflow goes. I'll try to write a script that converts a given string into individual Sprite nodes and adds some animations to them, shouldn't take too long (as we always say about scripting lol). Thanks for your input!

I also really should look into applying shaders to text, but I think I'll play with that after I mess around with this concept