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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects How can i create a solar eclipse?

  • How can i create a solar eclipse?

    Posted by Lunatic on August 29, 2006 at 7:40 pm

    Hi community,
    I want to create a solar eclipse using only Adobe After Effects (Pro) 7 without any Plugins. So, the first step would be creating the sun as some kind of a burning ball with a flaming corona and a flare effect if you know what I mean. Then another black ball (moon) would move on the x-axis over the sun. When the video begins, the moon covers already 2/3 of the sun and moves very slowly until it’s directly over the sun, so that you can only see the burning ring, which typically glows some more at the full solar eclipse.
    I’m completely new to After Effects and I’m still learning the basics but can you guys give me some hints on how to realize that project? How would you do it? And are there any tutorials related to this topic? Thanks in advance!

    Jon Walker replied 19 years, 8 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • Jon Walker

    August 30, 2006 at 2:11 pm

    Try creating a new yellow/orangeish solid and applying CCSphere to it. This will be your sun. Play around with some glow effects to get the look you want. Create another Black solid and create a circular mask that is slightly smaller than your sun. Then animate the position parameters to have the black solid move in front of the sun at the pace you desire to get the look you want. That is a quick and dirty way to do it but it should work. You could go way deeper and do some displacement mapping on the sun to get that hazy heat look and you could mask it out to where you don’t see the “moon” come in until it starts breaking the plane of the sun but if you’re fairly new I would start simple and then go from there. Play around with different effects and go crazy. Sometimes you get really cool accidents that turn out better than your original idea. Good luck. Hope that helped.

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