What about running the advanced shadow script within a selection?
The shadow would get cut off rather like a straight edge on all the selection areas and the shadow wouldn't have any spaces in it that were not filled.It would also gradually fade as that is what Graechans script was designed to do.

A gradient within a free selection seems close.

Motion blur. I started with a dup of the font, alpha locked it, colored it black, motion blur on the first layer by 2. Then duplicate that, motion blur by 4, dup again, motion blur by 6 or 7, and so on, until you got a long stretch of shadows. I did 5 layers of motion blurs in this one, you can do more for a better transition. Then adjust opacities on all the layers so it looks like it's fading into nothing since motion blur gives it that back edge you apparently don't want for this exercise. I admit I didn't go very precise with this, but you get the idea of what I did, hopefully.

I knew it would be something like that ek. Thanks for proving me right.

Ayup, I aim to please.

Here is a fg to transparent gradient inside a selection.

This was done with Saulgoodes 3Diffy script and a layer mask of a fg to transparent gradient.


It is indeed a challenge to get that right type of straight edged shadow effect.
I think tony has come closest in my humble opinion.

Just one more. This is with Tonys idea except i used 30 for length and duplicated the layer 4-5 times then created a new from visible and set the opacity. This kept the straight edges on the shadow even after motion blur.

XCF workspace file is attached also.

I think it looks better with some kind of texture though.

Not sure that will work with path-inbetweener alone... You will stroke things that aren't present in the shadow, you have to first edit the path to remove everything that can't cast a shadow, so if the shadow must extends towards the top left, you need to reduce the path to the red parts:



And while I was thinking about a way to algorithmically reduce that path, I found a possible other way to do this:
- set the text to white (temp layer), duplicate it and shift the duplicate in the direction of shadow
- set the top layer mode to difference: you get the outline of the text,only on the side of the shadow, while the rest of the text turns black
- add a layer mask, init to black and white copy of layer, and the black part become transparent, leaving you with just the outline.
- set alpha-lock and paint in black
- now the painful part: duplicate and shift this shadow several times, progressively reducing the opacity.

Sorry for the small demo, I continued on my example above:

Offnuts - Interesting technique and similar to what I was thinking, although your method of creating the initial shadow sounds much better. I was going to use the script multi-replicate for the offset layers as this has the added advantage of being able to grow each layer, so the shadow could expand as it fades. I don't think the script handles the opacity of each layer so this would have to be done by hand.

Hey that worked out pretty well.

Looks really cool!

wow, yet another thing that looked impossible but turned out quite possible! impressive job, everyone!

I love posts like this!

For small (< 500x500, or larger in the latest gimp) chunks of text just use brush dynamics with a gradient blend. Here is a graphic tutorial:


Note that this does not work with narrow text because the brush spacing can't go lower than 1 (gimp 2.6) and the dynamics are different with 2.8+

I can try it on my other machine layer to see the difference... It could also be scripted quite easily.

-Rob A>

Genius, RobA !



i did it by setting the dynamic to Color from gradient and stroking a path

The effects using colour from gradient and the stroke (just make sure the fade length matches the path or the reference circle) can be enhanced by a bit of a curve adjustment to make it pop a bit more:


For reference, here is the dynamic settings I used for that 100px long stroke:


And as another tip, after baking the white to black gradient stroke, just use Layer->Transparency->Colour to Alpha to turn the white transparent (rather than setting the layer mode to multiply), lock the layer's alpha channel, then fill the layer with any colour you want to get a coloured fade:


-Rob A>