Creating a looping street

[Brian Berneker]

You will have to stabilize the motion to a fixed point, for example the vanishing point would be a good spot. After that, you could probably mask the first portion of trees going out so that you have an overlap point. I think the road would settle for a cross dissolve, but a feathered mask might work.

Basically you want to do one complete cycle with a mask at the start and place it in a comp. Roll the timeline down near the end, and have a second instance of the comp that matches up with your masks and road position, then a third instance going back in time to make up the parts missing from the first mask. Set your in and out points to one look cycle and you should be ok.

Of course there will be no way of getting around the sky and any earth horizon, because they HAVE to shrink/grow in the distance. If the shot is high enough, looking down so as to have no sky showing, that should do away with that problem.

I did a simiar scene with artificial trees and road using trapcode particular. I was able to have a bus (actual footage) driving on a highway across a joshua-treed desert. Only thing was I had to gradually scale the sky and mountains down to create the distance. With a tilted down shot, you could probably do it though.

I’d love to see some of the footage or a few stills to comment more.

[Simon Bonner]

Once you have a loop of the street (a few seconds, the end of which blends back into the start), render out the comp as an image sequence. Then reimport it (import multiple files), select it in the project panel, hit cntl+f to get the interpret footage dialogue, and set to loop as many times as necessary (just set it really high so you don’t have to keep on going back and increasing the number). Then drop the sequence into your final comp. The animation should loop, and you only need to dedicate one layer to it in your comp.

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysFX