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Motion tracking stroke/3d stroke with a camera
Hi there,
I have a (line drawing based) logo as a series of paths and have imported it into After Effects. I have set up a stroke so that it sequentially “draws” the paths and looks like someone is hand drawing the logo on the screen. I want to make it look a bit more dynamic by having the camera’s point of interest track each stroke and maybe have the camera close to the stroke moving a little also and then panning back to reveal the full logo. I thought this would be possible by linking the cameras x and y point of interest to the stroke’s x and y position but I can’t seem to find x and y values for the stroke…any advice appreciated!
Thanks
Sam
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5 Replies
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I don’t think there is a way to get position values for the Stroke effect. It effects the path, based on a percentage of the path being affected, and I don’t think it uses any X,Y coordinates at all.
You can manually move the camera or link it to a null object as a camera controller. Getting it to follow the stroke as it happens isn’t going to be easy or automatic. You can fly by the stroke in 3D space though.
Andrew Kramer has some cool tutorials on using a null as a camera controller.
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I have tried to follow the path by moving the camera’s position a few times.. man it sucks good luck my friend
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Thanks for your advice. I created a null object and while it was pretty annoying to track the stroke manually, the results are pretty much exactly what I was after.
Sam
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On the layer that has the mask(s) if you hit “MM” to reveal all mask properties then click on “Mask Path” and hit copy.
Then click on the Point of Interest and hit “paste” (Apple “V” on a Mac) — this will copy the mask’s x/y coordinates to the point of interest of your camera. (You may then need to highlight all the keyframes it created (some will be roving keyframes) then “Option” drag the far right keyframe to spread out the keyframes to cover then length of time it take to fully stroke your mask.
Hope this is what you were after — though you already solved your problem with a workaround it sounds like….
Jim Dodson
8 Core Intel — Mac – OSX
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That was great. It worked perfectly for me (just ran across this thread). I have an additional question. I want the camera to orient in the direction of the path as it animates. (i.e. I will set the camera close to the level of the solid, tilt it to point “forward”, and want it to follow the animating stroke, twisting and turning. I’ve seen a tutorial (somewhere) on making an object orient with a path. Does it work the same with a camera?
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