animating projector

[Justin Productions]

What’s your everyday language?

Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.0 Professional

[Lars Bunch]

Hello,

The first complication that I see is that the reels in the projector image are seen at a slight angle. This means that if you were to cut them out and then rotate them about their center, they would wobble. Worse yet, the overlap where you can see the far side of the reel would rotate with the near side.

If I were dealing with this, I would cut out the near side of the reel and tweak it in photoshop so that it was a perfect circle. I would also cut out the far side of the reel and and steal bits to create a perfect circle far side that I could rotate. I would then create two layers that would rotate about their centers using an expression to drive the rotation.

Actually I’d probably just rebuild the reel in Maya and drop it in, saving me the headache of fixing it in photoshop.

As for the projector beam, I would create a white solid, mask it into a rough beam shape, use a radial blur centered at the lens nodal point, maybe throw in an animated fractal pattern (before the blur) to give a feel of the beam intensity fluctuating with the image it is projecting… Actually, if you can drive the beam intensity with actual footage, you might get a more realistic effect. Then I would adjust the opacity of the beam layer to get the right amount of beam. You might also want to feather the beam as it gets farther away from the projector to give it more of a sense of falloff.

I haven’t actually done anything like this so I may be way off base here. I’m just guessing at how I would approach it if I were to do so.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Amz370]

thanks thats what i was hoping wouldn’t be said

and my primary langauge is english…and do to public school once again…it’s bad english