The following documentation includes instructions on adding flourish meshes to your own blender file, keyframing and animating them, and additional tips/notes. A basic knowledge of Blender, rendering, compositing, material and texture setup is recommended to use these assets.

Adding A Flourish To Your Own Blender File

To add a flourish object to your blender file, you can follow the steps below:

1. Go to File>>Append in the top menu of Blender.

2. In the file view, select the flourish file from its folder (flourishes_v1.0)

3. You're almost done. Double-click the file and go to the collections folder

4. From there, there are different flourishes broken down into a handful of collections (e.g. AmpersandsCollection, SwishCollection...). You can select one of them or alternatively select the "FlourishCollection" to append all of them into your scene. There are also the cameras and a light in separate collections, these can be ignored if desired.

5. Select a collection and click append. You should now see the flourish pieces appear in your 3D View.

Animating A Flourish

6. To animate a flourish you can do so from the 3D View or from the Object Properties tab in the Properties Panel.

7. In the 3D View, select a flourish, click "n" to open your transform panel (if it's not open). Under properties at the bottom is the custom property for that individual flourish mesh.

8 To see it in the Object Properties, scroll to the very bottom of the Object Properties to see the custom property, which should be named "FlourishGrow"

9. To animate it, right click on the numerical slider and clear keyframes (if there are any).

10. Now you can slide the slider to 1.000 (so it's completely gone). 1.000 is no growth and 0.000 is fully grown.

11. Change the current frame in your timeline to a starting point. Move your mouse above the numerical slider and press "i", or right click to insert keyframe.

12. move your current frame to an end position and click "i" over the slider again to insert another keyframe.

13. And that's it!

Tips, Notes:

1. It's important to not edit or scale a flourish mesh object in edit mode, simply because they use shapekeys for their effect, which rely on vertex positions.

2. If you want to scale or warp a flourish, do it in object mode.

3. Since the flourishes are regular meshes, they are UV unwrapped and you can change materials and add textures to them however you want.

4. You can also add modifiers to them to create different effects, however I do not guarantee you'll always have good results. There are issues with the solidify with bevel combo, if the beveled edges are too large. You can experiment with it to find the right mix. Let me know if you come up with something awesome.

5. I currently use an emission material with a flat world background color as a quick and easy setup. You can add your own materials and textures though.

6. If you're wanting to composite these into a scene, over an image, you can uncheck the "Transparent" box under "Film" on the Render Properties tab in the Properties Panel. This will cause it to render without the world background. And I'd suggest setting the filter size to 2.00 px, this may help with alpha, however not required.

7. Also, in the Output Properties, under Post Processing, you can increase the dithering to 2.000 to minimize banding, if you have any kind of gradient happening in your rendered result. You can uncheck the "Sequencer" box too, if you're not using the VSE. Or leave it, be a rebel, whatever.