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Editing brush / paint stroke points (curves) like a mask?
I don’t understand how one would draw a brush stroke in AE without curve point. In Motion, you can edit the curve itself. (Much like a polygonal object in Maya, as another example.) And you can do it all without the use of masks.
I’ve seen on this page, it claims you CANNOT edit brush strokes. Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects
But then I read on title of this Adobe help page (here) that you can in fact “Animate and edit paint strokes”, but then receive only help for Animating.Help, Please?!?!
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2 Replies
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You’re looking at a version of the Meyers’ book from three versions ago, whereas the Help section that you’re pointing to is for After Effects CS4. Some things have changed.
If I understand correctly, you want to change a paint stroke after you’ve already drawn it. You’re correct that doing this isn’t immediately obvious; I don’t think that it was an intended part of the feature. But, because people often like to do unintended things, there are workarounds.
The one that I’d use in this case is to copy the paint stroke’s Path property and paste it into a dummy mask’s Mask Path property (or a shape’s Path property). Then, I’d edit the path as I normally would for a mask or shape. When I was done, I’d copy the Mask Path (or shape Path) property and paste back into the paint stroke’s Path property. Then delete the dummy mask or shape.
Animating paint strokes is really more intended for the workflow of painting a new stroke for each of the key frames, rather than tweaking an existing stroke on each key frame.
If you’re interested in drawing in this way, in which you can control the path more directly, I recommend checking out shape layers.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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Wow, thanks a lot. It never occurred to me that you could duplicate the properties into different kind of layer. It would still be nice to directly modify the points made on a paint stroke, but this opens a whole new perspective on paint strokes. Also, the mentioned link is great. I found it quite helpful with other minor issues I couldn’t overcome.
Again, thanks a lot. Hope to learn more from here.
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