-
adding “strings” to a moving layer
Hello,
i’m working on animation where an object bumps into a hanging piece of cardboard and makes it swing on a string it’s attached to. I was able to make a decent track of a live-action piece of cardboard on a string and attached tracking data (position and rotation) to a layer that has to perform that motion.
Now i’m kind of stuck with animating strings that said layer is supposed to be attached to. Top of the strings is out of the frame and bottom ends are hiding being the animated layer.Labor and time-intensive solutions i have so far:
1. Parent a solid to animated layer > add 3 point mask > use stroke on mask and manually animate top anchor point to be in the same position in relation to the video frame. Another issue with this solution (other than keyframing top point on the mask every frame) is that stroke is little finicky when under 1px renders jagged on some angles.2. Make 2 separate raster layers for strings > move anchor points to the bottom of each > parent to animated layer > keyframe rotation every frame for both so the top point stays in the same place.
3. Make thin line out of particles in Particular, attach emitter to the animated layer and animate gravity? (not really sure how to go about this one, if anyone done it before, i would really appreciate some pointers)
3. Animate the bugger in Cinema and stop looking for shortcuts.. :-/
here’s a rough diagram of the frame:
if anyone has any suggestions, i would really appreciate them 🙂
-
4 Replies
-
You might want to play around with the Puppet Tool. I’ve had good luck, not with strings, but with cables connecting in demos of hooking up computers. It might work, but would still have some keyframing chores attached to it. It’s not going to work like a physics simulation.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
If you have a clean plate you may be able to replace the piece of cardboard with a still, add the rope and animate using Newton for realistic physics.
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
Yea…Ted – that didn’t occur to me – I just purchased the Newton 2 upgrade, and there are some very realistic looking rope and chain capabilities in there. I haven’t had time to play with them yet, doing real work at the moment…
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
holy cow, of course!
i saw a presentation of Newton plugin a while ago, made a note to look into it and completely forgot about its existence as soon as next presentation started.
it’s lil’ expensive, i must say, wish there was a ‘light’ version, but, oh well…
thank you Tudor “Ted” Jelescu!!
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up