[USER ACTOR] Variable Width Lower Thirds

mark

Dear All,

So our friend @liminal_andy said some of the Office Hours people were trying to make a "lower thirds" tilting patch but ran into a snag: they wanted to have the background change its size based on the width of the text. Trying to guess the width based on the number of characters didn't work, and at the moment he asked I didn't have a solution.

Today I had a brainwave: use the Eyes++ actor to measure the size of the text! The key here is to use the 'blur' input of Eyes++ so that it sees the entire text as a single object... if you don't do that, it will see each letter as an individual object and will fail to measure the entire text properly.

With this in mind, I went a little wild creating a nifty User Actor that offers a lot of nice functionality including, a little GLSL shader that allows the background to fade to transparent on the right side.

Enjoy,
Mark

variable-width-lower-thirds.izz

liminal_andy

@mark And just like that, they are already using it on the Zoom backend :) You're the best!

deflost

@mark,

just great, isadora can do anything!

thx.

r.h.