Animated text points v10 — Asterisk
Five arms of candy-striped tubing knot into an asterisk, swelling and pinching as a size wave travels around the glyph's outline.
A single asterisk, blown up to fill the frame, is drawn as looping gradient tubes that twist around each other. Bulges chase along each arm while other stretches pinch to nothing, so the star keeps re-inflating itself; the palette runs through cyan, magenta, orange and violet sweeps with a bright sheen sliding over the surface.
The glyph's outline is sampled into points and every point stamps a rotating pair of petal circles. The stamp size does not ease — it alternates between zero and full size along the outline, which is what makes sections of an arm vanish and swell back. The tube shading is an opacity wave that runs along the point order at a different rate than the size toggle, so the highlights slide independently of the bulges.
