Create effect in Circle. Help please.

[Michael Szalapski]

Read the manual on such things as masks. You will find it an invaluable resourse.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Roberts]

Masks.. Got it. Thanks!

[Roberts]

I didn’t have much luck using the help. Can you possibly point me to a simple toutorial that may assit me?

[Serge Hamad]

Hi,

If you are using Particle Playground, draw a circular mask on your layer and assign it as a “Boundary” in the “Wall” menu of your Particle Playground effect.

Salut.
Serge

[Roberts]

Thanks.. That helps some. Altough I’m using Trapcode Particle. I do see an “Obsecure with” section under Visibility, but I’m not sure I have the mask defined correctly. Heres what I did.

I Made a new Solid ( Gray Solid 1) and “Drew” a circle with the pen tool.
Rlight clicked on that solid, added the effect and tried to set the “Obsecure” with (Gray Solid 1) was the only option listed in the pulldown.

I get error; “The particle layer itself, cannot be used to obsecure particles”

Am I getting close? I tried making another solid, and converting the layer to 3d and assigning it to the obsecure, but all the particles were just under that layer, and they did not stay in the boundries. 🙁

I appreciate the assistance. Many Thanks.

[Serge Hamad]

Hi,

I don’t have Particular on this machine but I don’t think that an Obscuration layer would produce the same effect then the wall feature in Particle Playground. If I recall right it was only meant to intersect your particles with a 3D layer.

Depending on your animation and the look you are after you may want to simply apply CC Sphere to your particle layer and switch its “Render” to “Outside”. Play with the lighting.
Or simply precompose your particle layer including all attributes, then apply a feathered mask to your precomp. But as I said it all depends on what you are after.

Maybe someone more familiar with Particular will answer your question here or at the Trapcode forum.

Salut.
Serge

[Roberts]

Thank you for your continued replies. 🙂 Here is what I am trying to do. Basically I have a web page template layed out in photoshop. I even create the buttons I want for my menu. So I use the slice tool in PS and it creates all the images and html document I need. I then take those menu buttons (jpg’s) into AE and I want to apply an effect to them. The problem lies in the effect “Spilling” over the border of the button. I you can see one of the jpg sequence images here. https://tyfactor.com/image10030.jpg
I have highlighted the actual button border in red. But as you can see, the smoke effect (From Particle) is going beyond the button itself.

Thank you again!

[Serge Hamad]

OK, then the precomp method I explained should do just fine.

Salut.
Serge