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Stop motion – Adding rotation to wheels in AE.
Hello I have made a stop motion animation short film using miniature tanks and what i want to learn for my next video is how i could rotate the individual wheels on the tanks.
Here is the video
https://reels.creativecow.net/film/21204
I was able to animate the tank tracks in the front on shots by duplicating a layer for each track then making a mask of each track and then manually moving the track mask and rezising it frame by frame, once that was done every few frames i added a directional blur and it worked quite well.
I assume this would work for the wheels with regard to making masks and then tracking them but what would be a good way to get them to rotate ? i tried to rotate them once but i wasnt able to change the point of rotation to the center of the wheel, it just rotated the wheel around the center of the screen.
thanks
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5 Replies
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— move the anchor point at the top of the transform list ?
— might be confusing as expect the point is centre of frame the wheel is on ( which is masked out )
— might be worth getting a closeup still of a single wheel which is then carefully positioned in the centre of the screen before making final adjustment to anchor point to make sure it rotates evenly – then scale track etc
————————- all the best —-chris
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Whew! That looks like it’d be a massive job, and you might as well be using CG tanks, which I guess would defeat the purpose of the exercise? I’m impressed you’ve found a way to make it look like the tracks move.
I think it’s quite quaint that they’re clearly model vehicles. A bit like the war films online where everything’s made of cardboard.Paddy, CreativeMedia.org.uk
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— agree Paddy — did actually wonder if it really mattered that the wheels did not turn ?? – chris
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i can’t think a an easy way to accomplish this…
i’m not sure that they need to actually rotate, i think you could use a radial blur to simulate motion blur on the wheels, but you’d be doing that to each wheel, and the wheels would need to be individually blurred, and the center of the blurs would need to track with each wheel… so, it’s still a lot of work.
even if you just created the motion blurred wheels in photoshop (cut each wheel type out on to separate layers, center them and apply radial blur), then imported those layers into ae to use to cover the existing wheels, you’d still need to track each wheel to replace with a blurred wheel.
i suppose for some shots, where the tanks move straight across the frame, you could try building out a pre-blurred wheel/tread assembly, then track just that single element with the tank (for each tank)…
i do think you did a great job with what you have right now… for the next one, you might try to get/make moving wheels on the models, so as the change positions the wheels can change rotations, which i think would be enough to make this work nicely.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks for all the tips, will give them a go when I get to that stage, I’ve just started putting together the buildings and landscapes for a North Africa setting so will let you know how I get on.
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