Adding a "watermark" to an animation    26 May 00


If you want to add a "watermark" -- a semi-transparent copyright notice, logo, etc. -- to an image or animation it's fairly easy. First you need to create an image that contains the text of the watermark (assuming it's text we want, and not a logo or something).

Open your favorite paint program and create a new image. Make it square. The final image size will need to be 128x128, so either create it that size now, or create it larger and resize it at the end. It really depends on how well your paint program creates antialiased text (smooths the edges so there are no jaggies). If it doesn't do good enough job (especially at the relatively small font size we'll need) then create it larger and resize at the end.

Here's what I came up with.



If the text you want to add is fairly long and won't fit nicely in this size image, there are two things you can try. First, you can rotate the text 45 degrees which gives you a little more room, but usually distorts the text a little.


You can see how there is a little more room for text. The other method involves breaking the text up into two separate images. In my example I would probably put "(C)2000 Alan" on one image and "Lorence" on the other image using the same size font. The problem with breaking it up into 2 images is that it makes it more difficult to add to a project -- but just a little more difficult.

Now save the image(s) in a format Illusion can read -- choose a lossless format for best quality (PNG, TGA, BMP for example) and open Illusion.

On to Illusion...

We are going to create a "watermark" emitter on the stage, but you can create it in a library instead if you prefer. Add any emitter to the stage (the simpler the better because we're just going to delete all of its particle types anyway). Now open its properties dialog. Select the emitter name in the dialog hierarchy window, then click the "new particle type" button to create a "blank" particle type. (If you don't select the emitter name first, you'll create a copy of another particle type, and that's not what we want.) Rename it "watermark" or something similar and then delete all of the other particle types in this emitter. This is what the emitter should look like now -- a "blank" emitter:



Now switch to the "Particles" page and check the "single particle" option. Select the particle Size property and slide the value (in the graph window) up to max. Now select the Emitter Size property and slide the value (in the graph window) up to 200 or so. You should have a dim blur in the preview window:



Now the last step to creating the watermark -- loading the watermark image. Select the "Particles" page then the "Change Shape" tab. Click the "add new shape to library" button, select the watermark image you saved before, import it as "Regular grayscale shape", then click the "Make Active" button. Close the properties dialog by clicking the OK button.

You can now adjust the size of your watermark using the Emitter Size property, and change the transparency of it using the Visibility property. When you get these settings right, add the emitter to a library (R-click on the stage emitter and "Add to Library", load or create a project, then add the new watermark emitter to it. You may want to adjust the size and or visibility again depending on the project. Here's what mine looks like finished:



There is one problem with this type of watermark though -- when the image is white, the watermark won't be visible. There are a few ways to deal with this. One is to make the text grey and create an alpha channel for the text that is white text on black, then import the shape as "full-color" instead of "regular grayscale". One thing to keep in mind: make sure that the watermark emitter is on top of all other emitters, or you'll never get it to show properly no matter what color it is or what the alpha channel looks like. =) Here's what mine looks like using an image that is grey text with white text alpha channel:



You could still have problems seeing this watermark if the output is mostly grey. You can solve this by creating a box around the text that is a different color, which would make sure that the text would still be visible.


The project files:   


Alan Lorence    26 May 00