Adding a Final Fantasy Style Battle Menu?

[Darby Edelen]

[ReeceMix] “I searched all over the net and I cant find a simple tutorial for adding images to video and animating them.”

Import the image into After Effects and you can drop it into a composition as a layer. The image should retain any transparency it had before and you can place it above the video in the layer stack/timeline of your composition then animate its properties or add effects.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Eric Barker]

NOTE: This thread should probably be moved to After Effects Basics

Well, first off, this is going to be made a lot simpler if you know your way around Photoshop. Your best bet is to pre-make all your menus as photoshop files. If you know what you’re doing, it shouldn’t take long at all. Make as much as you can (everything that won’t be animated) in Photoshop, and then do the rest in After Effects. All you’ll need is to make a few rounded rectangle objects, go into style options, give them a gradient overlay (blue to black), a medium-grey stroke. Then go to “bevel/emboss” and chose “stroke emboss”. You’re going to have to merge the rounded rectangles down to one layer without the additional blending options, because After Effects can’t handle the stroke effect properly.

Play with the fonts, but it looks like something in the vacinity of Verdana will do (and remember to disable anti-aliasing… the PS1 didn’t have anti-alaising for text). Leave out the Progress bars, and the HP/MP text. You’re going to need a hand picture (you’re going to need to cut it out of a screenshot online somewhere). You may want to create the progress bars, on different layers from the background to the progress bar, and then use sliding masks in After Effects to make them go up or down.

The bottom line is, there are A LOT of very little things that have to be done to do this correctly. Nothing complicated, but a lot of little things. The more you can do in Photoshop, the less you’ll have to do in After Effects. Just remember you can implort multi-layer photoshop files into AE as compositions, and they’ll retain all their individual layers… but be carefull, any blending effects could be different or non-existant, so you may want to merge down your layers to simple raster layers without blending effects, before you import them.

See if this gets you started.

[Darby Edelen]

[Eric Barker] “You’re going to have to merge the rounded rectangles down to one layer without the additional blending options, because After Effects can’t handle the stroke effect properly.”

Just a quick note:

If a layer has styles in Photoshop you can right click it and Group As a New Smart Object and AE will see the layer styles on import.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Bill Clotz]

I recently made something like that in flash for a school project. It’s actually not all that hard to create it entirely in After Effects.

Are you trying to build it all yourself or were you intending to cut out the menus from footage you recorded from in the game? If you are just cutting it out from footage of the game it ought to be really simple. Just a little masking and some keying.

If you are making it yourself, its still pretty easy, but the whole process of animating all the little pieces can be extremely time consuming. You can make the boxes from just a mask, the stroke effect, and ramp effect.