Creating Pac Man

[Rjf E:613]

Sure!

Step 1:) Create a new white or yellow solid. Choose the Circle Mask tool (keyboard shortcut: “Q” until you see a circle icon in the toolbar) and create a perfect circle mask on your solid by holding down shift and dragging to the desired Pac Man size. Next choose the pen tool (keyboard shortcut “G”) and click once in the middle of the circle and two more times outside the left of the circle for a total of three points, creating the mouth. Go into the timeline and change the Mask2 option from “Add” to “Subtract”. This should subtract the triangle out of the circle forming the mouth. You may have to tweak the points of the mouth slightly to form a good looking triangle.

Step 2:) on to animation… go to the first frame of the composition and set a keyframe for the mask shape of the mouth. Go down say 3 to 5 frames (keyboard shortcut “PageDown” for each frame) and collapse the outer points of the mouth to close the mouth off in a chomping motion. A keyframe for this shape will already be created. then go down another 3 to 5 frames. Select the first keyframe in the timeline and choose “control+C” on a PC or “command+C” on a Mac to copy the keyframe value. Then choose “control+v” or “command+v” to paste that value. You should now have a total of three keyframes. If you scrub back and forth, you’ll see the mouth open and close.

Step 3:) unfortunately, I’m not able to see a way to loop keyframes for a mask shape (wonder why?). So your choices are to either copy and paste the three keyframes a bunch of times, or precompose and loop it that way.

Hope this gets you started!

rjf