DARA’S GUIDE: Creating Text from Overlays

Creator's Corner Directing Help & Tips
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Please visit my website for more templates and guides!

This thread is not about word overlays.

You can create your own custom texts out of overlays, and you can animate them in the same way as overlays. Instead of having basic dialogue in speech boxes, you can use overlay texts.

Here is the code:

@overlay OVERLAY NAME create text Your text here.

It’s basically the combination of an overlay create command and a reader message command.

  1. An overlay text is treated the same exact way as an overlay, so be sure to use the opacity command to make the text appear in your scene.
  2. You can use any overlay you want, but the image of that overlay will not appear once you change it into a text overlay.
  3. You can also use a non existing overlay. You can just make up your own “overlay” name without actually using an existing overlay.
  4. You can shift, rotate, and change the opacity of the text overlay. More information on how to do that here: DARA’S GUIDE: Overlays

Here is the CAR BUG REAR overlay that I will be using for example.

@overlay CAR BUG REAR create

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Here is what the overlay will look like once I turn it into a text overlay

@overlay CAR BUG REAR create text Hello there world!

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Use COLOR TEXT EFFECTS!

some other text effects may or may not work

@overlay CAR BUG REAR create text |color:royalblue| Hello there world!

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More information on text effects here: Reader Messages / Text Effects Guide Updates

You can even have a typed in response!

@overlay CAR BUG REAR create text My name is [FIRSTNAME] [LASTNAME]!

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More information on typed in choices here: DARA’S GUIDE: Typed-in Choices

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Dara, YOU ARE BEYOND sorry, I can’t think of a word THAT’S HOW AMAZING YOU ARE

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Wow. That’s kinda handy. Although I prefer to use my overlays, because of the font possibilities, but still

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I had no idea you could do that. Thank you so much :smile:

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Amazing

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@Dara.Amarie Once your done using the text overlay, is there a way to remove it?

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So you would just use the clear command.

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A Guide to Using & Animating OVERLAYS

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Thanks!

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This is incredible. Thank you so much!

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does this work for writing readers put in? like [NAME] for MC? In featured stories I’ve been able to choose usernames and such that were later displayed in the story, was it a different method?

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&overlay NAMEOVERLAY create text [NAME]

NAMEOVERLAY can be anything you want so you can animate it like a normal overlay

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I dont understand any of this, can someone please help a beginner here :sob:

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I read that and I still don’t understand :confused:

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What don’t you understand? Practice makes perfect :slight_smile:

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yes! which is why I’m not giving up till i learn :blush: I’d like to create overlays into text and animate them so in my story, when I’m introducing the characters the text can come sliding in next to the character, introducing their name and some adjectives. but I’m just a beginner and I don’t know how to play around with the opacity and stuff on episode

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Can you possibly get different fonts other than the normal one?

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What programs or websites can I go to make my own word overlays using different fonts?

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pixlr.com/editor

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