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  • Alpha questions.

    Posted by Rose Culhane on June 27, 2008 at 8:42 pm

    Hi all! (Fairly new to AE…)

    Here’s my situation: I have a burning wheel that was exported from 3ds max with several different Render elements. The fire was created using the plug-in FumeFX. I am using the Render elements “FumeFX Fire” & “FumeFX Smoke” to create a comp in AE. I have imported both separately as footage in AE (tga sequence). I want to change the Smoke to an alpha layer and be able to adjust it to lighten the smoke on the Fire layer when layered above it. I also want to be able to adjust the color of the Smoke.

    Thanks in advance for the responses.

    Rose Culhane replied 17 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Mike Park

    June 28, 2008 at 11:15 pm

    That is simple enough. Just duplicate your smoke layer and change the track matte of the bottom one to alpha or luma of the smoke layer above. Make sure the smoke layer above is not visible. You can then adjust the opacity of the invisible smoke layer to control the opacity of the visible smoke layer.

    As for adjusting the color of the smoke, that should be simple enough if you rendered out the smoke as a seperate layer. Just apply some color correction to it, ie curves, cc toner, etc…you can then use this layer as is or control the color of the smoke by changing the transfer mode of the layer to hue or color, depending on what gives you the best look.

  • Rose Culhane

    June 30, 2008 at 12:56 pm

    Thanks Mike. I had tried that method before posting but was unsuccessful. The problem was the render element (FumeFX Fire) had a huge black smoke trail with it. We wanted the fire separate from the smoke. We rendered out the same 3D elements but used different settings. We were able to have a fire only and smoke only layer. I appreciate your response, thanks for the help. 🙂

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