• Adobe After Effects

  Creating complex dynamic masks

  Posted by Liam Pope on June 24, 2019 at 6:36 am

  Hi,

  I have created this wireframe overlay using a solid layer with many instances of the beam effect to generate the wires, which is tracked to the motion of the person.

  

  I intend on using this effect in footage with multiple people standing in front of one another, however I do not want the wireframes in the back to be visible through the spaces of the foreground wireframe layer.
  I am curious if anyone knows of a method to generate a mask that occludes everything “inside” the beams?
  It will need to animate with the motion of the wireframe.

  Thankyou for your help!

  Liam Pope replied 7 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Kalleheikki Kannisto

  June 24, 2019 at 7:40 pm

  Mask points should be movable with nulls these days (I haven’t tried, but recall reading that), so you can create multiple masks of suitable shape (mostly triangles) and attach the corner points to nulls that follow those tracked points. And use those masks to hide things.

  Kalleheikki Kannisto
  Senior Graphic Designer
• 

  Liam Pope

  June 25, 2019 at 12:13 am

  I was hoping to avoid rotoscoping if possible for this project.

  Thanks for the tip Kalleheikki, I found a solution similar to what you described.

  What I did was create a shape layer and draw the points in 2D space to roughly match the 3D nulls controlling the wireframe layer.
  I found a tool “create nulls from paths” which generates nulls for each point of the shape layer, with each point then following the nulls.
  I then made these shape layer nulls 3D layers, snapped them to the positions of the wireframe nulls, and parented them so that they copy the transforms.

  As my shape layer points follow the shape layer nulls, and the shape layer nulls follow the wireframe nulls, the shape layer accurately matches the outline of the wireframe.

  Thankyou!

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