Here is another fun way to do unspeakable things to innocent fonts.
The curvy_char subnetwork takes a text string (one character at a time) and adjusts its "curviness". It's great fun to try different fonts and turn the curviness knob to see what happens. The effect is somewhat similar to the Round Segments node; it reduces a text path to its basic points and then connects them with curves instead of line segments.
The results look best when animated. Attached is a short video of the word "breathe" breathing in and out (loop for maximum relaxation). In the NodeBox network you can adjust the rate of breathing by changing the period value in the wave node.
Curvy Characters is another one of my experiments to explore and demonstrate how to get more control over paths. It requires two custom nodes, path_string (see my recent post about it), and a new node: make_curve. Make curve give you full control over curves by letting you set both control points independently. A clever subnetwork, fit_curve, takes any set of points and calculates the control points of a curve that will pass through all those points; it then uses make_curve to draw the new curved path (open or closed). See my Curves! post for more information. Thanks to Bernhard R. Fischer for the open source algorithm behind fit_curve.
Enjoy! (And don't forget to breathe.)
John
