mcas

Motion Canvas Asset Set provides motion canvas assets that are frequently used on my YouTube channel (LiquidZulu). This repository is currently under development, so do not count on it.

Table of Contents

1. Installation
2. Usage
   1. Documentation
   2. Examples

Installation

MCAS is available as an npm package, and on GitHub. For either method, if you want to use the cli you will have to add the location you downloaded MCAS to to your PATH, which allows you to run the cli using the mcas script.

If you want to have MCAS installed as a local git repo, it is going to be helpful to make an alias to it in your tsconfig:

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "paths": {
            "@mcas/*": ["/path/to/where/you/cloned/mcas/*"]
        },
        ...
    },
    ...
}

Which then allows you to reference MCAS in your project by doing:

import { makeScene2D, Rect, Ray, Img } from '@motion-canvas/2d';
import {
    all,
    chain,
    waitFor,
    createRef,
    createRefArray,
    createSignal,
} from '@motion-canvas/core';
import { colors, McasTxt as Txt, popin, popout } from '@mcas/lib';

export default makeScene2D(function* (view) {
    view.fill(colors.bg);

    const glowingText = createRef<Txt>();
    view.add(
        <Txt glow fontFamily="Oswald" fill="red" ref={glowingText}>
            HELLO WORLD
        </Txt>,
    );

    yield* popin(glowingText);
    yield* waitFor(5);
    yield* popout(glowingText);
});

Usage

Documentation

Documentation is provided in the lib directory.

Examples

Generating Quote Scenes

The MCAS cli allows for the generation of quotes from provided orgmode documents. An example of this can be seen in test/src/scenes/quoteExample.tsx.

So, lets say that we have a video script called script.org that we want to generate quote scenes for. The first step is to pull the quotes out of the .org file into a format that can then be used by motion-canvas:

mcas -q script.org

This will generate all of the relevant files in ./script.org-quotes, including an index.ts ready to import into your animation. If you want to automatically generate a number of individual image sequences (this is recommended) from all of these quotes, then make a tsx file like:

import john from './assets/quote-cards/john.png';
import sally from './assets/quote-cards/sally.png';
import nathan from './assets/quote-cards/nathan.png';
// assuming that you stored the quote files in ./assets
import quotes from './assets/script.org-quotes';
import { makeQuoteScene } from 'mcas';

// We need to have a way to select the correct png image
// for each of our potential quote authors.
const cardMap = new Map([
    ['john', john],
    ['sally', sally],
    ['nathan', nathan]
]);

export const quoteScenes = quotes.map((x, i) =>
    makeQuoteScene(
        cardMap.get(x.author),  // the author image
        x,                      // information about the quote text png
        x.citation,             // the citation to use for this quote
        `quote-${i}`            // the name that motion-canvas will use to identify it
    )
);

Then in the project.ts all of these scenes can be presented by doing:

import { makeProject } from '@motion-canvas/core';
import { quoteScenes } from './scenes/quoteExample';

export default makeProject({
    experimentalFeatures: true,
    scenes: quoteScenes,
});

If you want to also have other scenes rendering at the same time you can do:

import { makeProject } from '@motion-canvas/core';
import { quoteScenes } from './scenes/quoteExample';
import someOtherScene from './scenes/someOtherScene?scene';

export default makeProject({
    experimentalFeatures: true,
    scenes: [
        ...quoteScenes,
        someOtherScene
    ],
});