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Animated gradient alpha revealing lines…
Hello,
I know…sounds a bit confusing. I don’t know how to explain it well so here goes.
I am trying to reverse engineer a spot element. It is a group of stacked 3D lines (5) in sort of a wavy spline shape that reveal on & off with an animated alpha gradient. I have been able to recreate perfectly the lines in 3D Stroke (using the Offset parameter to animate the lines across a wavy spline) and C4D but can’t for the life of me figure out how that softness is created on the start & end.
Here are the frames containing the lines I am speaking of.
https://www.marasmalley.com/images/Americas.Cup.jpg
Here’s the spot the lines appear in (10 mb):
https://www.digidojo.net/pics/tech_pics/animated_lines.mov
These lines wipe across the screen with a wide long gradiated transparency on each end. I can create these lines in AE & C4D but can’t figure out how to do the transparency (it almost looks like a 3D track matte). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you so much 🙂
Joey
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5 Replies
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I would use a layer shader in your alpha channel and multiply a gradient over your lines.
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Thanks for replying Adam. Can you expand on that please?? Modeling is not a problem for me but shaders are not my strong suit.
Thank you so much
Joe
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It would probably be easier to look at an example.
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Awesome, Adam…thank you for posting that. One more thing…how is the actual wipe animated keeping both edges soft throughout?
Thank you for your help.
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Ahh … wellll … hmmm … that’s going to be a little tricky! Guess I shoulda anticipated that one. 🙂
One way you could do it would be to use Xpresso to use the sweep start/end parameters to drive the position of the gradient points, but that’s going to be pretty involved.
And easier way would be to use a texture in place of the layer shader in the alpha channel, and instead of actually animating the sweep, animate the texture tag’s Y offset position. The downside is that you’re not going to get a fade as the lines disappear completely. You can either hide that with spline/object placement, or you can add the effect in post with a little rotoscoping.
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