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Alternative Radio Wave Technique ?
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I’m not sure what you mean by bulge and wave in this context, but it sounds achievable. Tell me what you want to see, and maybe I can give you a mini-tute. Don’t describe how you would try to do it. Describe the effect like my mother trying to tell me about something she saw.
Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com -
You know how speakers vibrate, well the text bulges to create a vibrate then the wave comes out each time there is a vibrating bulge.
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Well, you could create a layer with text on it, then use a bulge effect to create it’s bulge. Behind/under that, you could have a composition of radio waves that has been masked to only be visible on the sides.
Would that accomplish it?
Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com -
I have the bulge effect in place, but I will try the masking with the radio waves although I’m still not sure how I will create the expression that will drive the waves when the bulge happens.
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Maybe that’s where we’re having a disconnect. The radio waves effect has built in controls for how often the waves emanate, their shape, their color, their thickness, their outward speed, their fade/decay… They start coming at the start of your layer. If you need to time their movement to say, an audio track, you need to adjust their speed and frequency. Changing those values with timely placed keyframes would easily create groups of pulsing waves. Play around with it for awhile and see if it does the trick.
Now, if you want to have this done automatically…. yeah, you can do it with expressions. You’ll need to link those speed and frequency values to the amplitude of your audio track. I can’t give you specific code without doing it myself, but that’s where I’d start.
Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com -
I’ve run into a problem, I can’t seem to get the radio wave not to start from the center, so I applied a mask but the effect is still not what I want, and I don’t know how to enable the mask feature within the radio waves effect itself.
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Masks are always applied to the outside of a layer. Think of your radio waves in their solid as simply an ingredient that you move around your stage. It may have a centerpoint locator, but you don’t really need it if you just move your solid that contains the effect to the place that you want it.
To avoid more frustration, this might be a good place for you to back up and dig up some tutorials on the basics of After Effects and how it works with layers/effects. Even if you get it to “kinda” work, you’ll likely be disappointed/limited by your final result because you don’t yet know what’s available to you as part of AE’s basic workflow.
Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com -
I understand that masks are applied to a outside layer, how come I can’t get to the mask feature within the radio waves effect?
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Not sure I understand “get to the mask feature within…” but remember what I said earlier, you may need to precomp the radio waves layer within it’s own comp and apply the mask to the comp. AE is all about nested compositions. Think of each comp as a folder of elements. You can often apply effects and masks to each layer within a comp”folder”, or you can apply effects and masks to the entire folder. Try that.
Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com -
Look within the radio wave effect you’ll see “mask”.
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