Taking some inspiration from the lovely magnifying glass that K1TesseraEna created, I decided to try my hand at making a magnifying glass moving over some text:



The "magnification" is done using the Curve Bend distortion filter. Naturally, GAP was used in developing the animation since it does involve multiple animations being combined to appear as a single seamless animation.

The Curve Bend filter can be used for many interesting animations. Here are a couple more that I made previously using the filter:



and this:



Thank you for taking the time to view these.

Wow! Your work is spectacular ccbarr. Nice to see you.

The magnifying glass animation is fantastic!

molly, 2-ton, Graechan,

Thank you all very much for the kind comments.

I thought I would share a bit of how the magnifying glass animation was done. First I started with a static image:



Originally I created a 90x90 square window to pass over the text and intended to use an animated layer mask to create the magnifying effect. When that effort failed, I realized another way.

I created a scrolling animation inside a 90x90 square:



I then used Frames Modify from GAP and using Apply Filter on Frame(s) I selected the Curve Bend Filter selecting the Apply Constant button:



Using these settings:



That produced this result:



Now the trick was to run the above animation over the original static background image shown above so it would look like the text was being magnified. This required some arithmetic. My text layer was 473 pixels in width. It traversed the 90x90 square layer from beginning to end, meaning it traveled 473 + 90 = 563 pixels. Since my original static image is 640 pixels wide, taking 640 - 563 = 77 pixels. That is the total empty space on both sides of the text layer in the static image. Half of that empty space is on the left side, half on the right side. 77/2 = 38.5, which I rounded to 38. So, when using Move Path to insert the curving bending animation above over the static image, I began it at X position 38 (pixels) and ended it at position 602 ( 640 - 38 = 602). The original animation I received was this:



I later used Move Path with Step Mode set to Frame Ping Pong to get the back and forth motion shown in the final animation.

Finally, I added my homemade magnifying glass



to also move from X position 38 to position 602 and back again in Move Path from GAP to arrive at the animation shown above.

A little information for those who may be curious about understanding more about the background behind the animation. Thank you for taking the time to review this.

I wish I had GAP for MAC, and understood how to use it.

Thanks for a wonderful animation and thank you for the description of how it was achieved.

Magnifying glass animation is MAGNIFICENT !
I am sooooo sooooo much into animations and have noticed your excellent work in the past.
You are one of my idols on here ccbarr!

Excellent magnifying glass. Nice work.

Very impressive!
Thanks for sharing your animations and techniques!
GAP doesn't work in my GIMP 2.8 the way it used to work in GIMP 2.6.11.
After reading this thread I've installed 2.6 again on top of 2.8 just to get back working GAP.

Nice to see you ccbarr! Thank you for sharing. Those are fantastic.

Thanks. Very helpful tut.

Very complex! But fantastic! Thanks for sharing !