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Animating a Wire/ Cable? Roto or plug-in?
Hello!
I just saw an iPod spoof on Steve Balmer’s famous motivational dance, where they added an iPod and some headphones.
Video’s available on youtube https://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIk4qTKmKzE
(called “Zune Balmer” in case the link is broken).What I wonder is whether there is a way of animating a wire, with expressions or a plug-in (weighting the cable or vertexes) and have it follow some tracked points?
…or is the way here to animate a stroked mask?
The cable seems to move realistically and I imagine mimicking gravity would be very hard!Any suggestions?
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3 Replies
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One other option, if you haven’t shot already, is to shoot your actor Green (or Blue) screen and then paint your earbuds and wire the opposite color (blue or green). Pull a separate mask for the wire and composite it that way.
There will surely be some challenges with keying something that thin, especially in fast motion, but a little roto is better than a lot! I’d also stay away from HDV formats if possible. A nice DV50 4:2:2 signal or better keys quite nicely (if you have the budget!).
Good luck!
Chris
Chris Heuer
Freefall FX, LLC -
“don’t forget to remove the pulldown, or your roto task becomes Hell On Earth.”
True Dat!
Chris Heuer
Freefall FX, LLC -
I could be way off base, but I think it’s likely that the wires in that example were rendered in a 3d package.
If I were going to reverse-engineer the effect, I would motion track the attach points of the cable (the ears) and translate that data into a 3d program as a couple of nulls. Attach some 3d geometry (the cables) to those nulls and apply soft body or cloth dynamics to the geometry and let the nulls swing it around with some gravitational force pulling down on it.
The roto would come in after the 3d stuff is rendered and brought back into AE and you need the cables to be hidden behind the character.
That’s just a guess though. I just felt like the movement of the cable looked kind of like a dynamics effect rather than something hand-drawn or expressioned.
j.
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