• Adobe After Effects

  glowing highlights on a rotating sphere

  Posted by Eric Liner on March 22, 2011 at 6:35 pm

  Hi,

  I’ve created an earth with cc sphere that rotates to reveal certain locations. The initial move is really straightforward, but now I need to highlight these locations by making them glow as we travel over and past them. My initial thought was to duplicate the globe layer and add masks to the duplicate layer outlining the regions that I want to highlight. I figured that the masks would follow the rotation of the original globe layer and only reveal the key spots. Then I could add a tint or glow to the masked layers and fade the opacity when I need to see them. Unfortunately, adding a mask to a layer that’s using cc’sphere doesn’t seem to work. I’ve tried different blend modes for the mask and still no luck.

  As an alternative, I created solid layers with masks that match the important geographical locations. The problem is, the globe never completely stops and the only way to track it is to move the mask(s) frame by frame. The resulting animation is never very smooth.

  Any suggestions on how to achieve this? I’m sure there is a simple solution out there.

  Thanks!

  Eric

  Michael Szalapski replied 15 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Michael Szalapski

  March 22, 2011 at 6:41 pm

  You want a duplicate comp with the glows in it set with the same CC Sphere settings and just animate the opacity of the glows in the precomp.

  – The Great Szalam
  (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
• 

  Eric Liner

  March 22, 2011 at 8:05 pm

  Thanks Michael.

  While I don’t think I did exactly what you suggested, your advice got me on the right path.

  I ended up going into photoshop and, using my original satellite earth image, masked the different locations that I needed to highlight. Saved those with an alpha channel, brought them into my original comp and applied the same cc-sphere settings, a tint, and a glow. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it seems to work.

  Cheers,
  Eric
• 

  Michael Szalapski

  March 22, 2011 at 8:53 pm

  I was suggesting something similar, but my suggestion didn’t involve leaving AE. Glad to know it got you a solution though!

  – The Great Szalam
  (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

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