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[NEWBIE] animate a fill through a closed object
Hi, I drew a simple 2-D “pipe’ in illustrator, imported the layer to after effects, and now all i want to do is animate a blue fill starting from the left and ending to the right. thats it. how on earth do i do this?? i’ve been messing with it almost all day, and i cant figure it out. any help will be much appreciated.
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3 Replies
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If the pipe has alpha around it, make a mask the shape of the pipe, Pen Tool or Layer>Auto Trace (only Current Frame needed if the pipe doesn’t move, Tolerance and Threshold at 1). If the pipe has a mask defining the pipes, get your mask from there, Copy the mask Shape. Anyway, take a mask the shape of the pipes and Paste that into a new Blue Solid (Ctrl Y) layer. Put that on top of the Pipe layer.
Add Transition>Linear Wipe to the Blue Solid layer, animate the Transition Completion from 100 to zero with keyframes, and set Wipe Angle at -90. You can feather the linear wipe if you want.
Most of the time you would have the other layer on top and linear wipe it, but this way, if you want to still see the pipe walls as the blue fills, a cool look methinks, then just reduce the Mask Expansion (MM reveals) on the Blue Solid’s Mask.
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If the Pipe has many bends and is convoluted, and you don’t like the way Linear Wipe looks (straight Left to Right), then animate that blue solid layer, now on top, as you would animate a signature being drawn on, such as this from Aharon:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/animating_signature.php
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well, after a few hours of toying with it using your instructions, not only did i make a pretty impressive movie clip, but i also got the jump start i needed to actually understand the program and what it is all about. my movie is really going to impress my research group. thanks a bunch yikesmikes!
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Good. No small feat. Those Research Groups can be very picky.
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