• Adobe After Effects

  Scaling a mask to match a layer shape.

  Posted by Dylan Hargreaves on February 24, 2015 at 10:17 am

  Hey folks, a bit rusty with the old After Effects skills, so I thought I’d drop by to borrow your brains for a moment…

  I’m animating a title slate where I want to animate a comic-style speech bubble by scaling it up. The speech bubble is layered on top of a solid background layer.

  I’m going to scale the speech bubble up from zero and I want the inside of it to be transparent, so a third layer underneath the background is revealed inside the speech bubble. So essentially:

  Top Layer – speech bubble
  Middle Layer – Background
  Bottom layer – talent

  Easy enough to do by manually drawing a mask on the background layer which matches the outline of the speech bubble.

  Where I’m coming unstuck is scaling the mask to match the scaling up from zero of the speech bubble. I’ve tried track matting and a couple of other things, but no joy yet. I’m sure this easy as hell if you know what you’re doing, but like I say, I’m a little rusty!

  Thanks in advance!

  D

  Tudor “ted” jelescu replied 11 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Tudor “ted” jelescu

  February 24, 2015 at 11:23 am

  Create Speech Bubble as solid and animate. Duplicate layer and use as track matte for the Background layer, comped on top of Speech Bubble. Use Matte Choker to shrink the Background to reveal the outline of the Speech Bubble (you may have to precompose the Track matte layer and background and apply Matte Choker on the precomp).

  Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
  Senior VFX Artist

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up