• Adobe After Effects

  Creating Pores

  Posted by Mike Bugera on February 11, 2011 at 6:25 pm

  I have a cross section of skin that I created in Photoshop but now need to create pores to composite on top of it. I need to have them open, receive a particle and water droplet that get absorbed through the skin layer, and then close again.

  I have all the other elements in place. What would be the best way to create the pores?

  Mac Pro, 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel running After Effects 7.0 Professional with no additional plugins.

  Thank you.

  Erik Waluska replied 15 years, 2 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Tudor “ted” jelescu

  February 11, 2011 at 8:32 pm

  Maybe duplicate the layer and “drill” holes through it, then composite on top of base skin with drop shadow that is a darker skin tone color and use matte choker to open and close the “pores”. That’s the first thing that comes to mind.
  Another more fancy option would be to use Free Form and create a displacement map for the pores- you can then animate the displacement in 3d (negative displacement) and use AE camera and lights to make them visible by casting shadows and slowly moving the camera to change perspective…

  Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
  Senior VFX Artist
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  Erik Waluska

  February 12, 2011 at 5:54 pm

  Since it’s just a flat 2D cross section of the skin I would create a single pore in photoshop and then animate the open/close of the pore with the puppet tool or mesh warp in AE in a pre-comp, then composite as many copies of the pre-comp as you need in your main comp over the skin. You could easily control the timing of the open/close animations by offsetting the pre-comps in the timeline.

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