Disney Shadow Blend

[Anders Hattne]

Unfortunately I don’t understand what you want to achieve. Could you show some images of what you have and want to achieve?

http://www.ardillamedia.com

[Walter Soyka]

To build an effect like this, you want to create a new layer that contains only the two colors you’re looking for and blur them.

Try this: duplicate your footage, then add two Color Key effects (one for each of the colors you want to blur, the Invert Alpha preset, a Blur effect, and finally a Matte Choker effect (in that order) to the top layer. Adjust to suit. You may need to create an animated garbage masks to eliminate any unwanted blurring in areas of similar color.

The keys knock out the colors you want to blur, leaving only the colors you don’t. The Invert Alpha reverses that, so you keep the colors you want to blur, and knock out the rest. The blur is self-explanatory. The Matte Choker helps you tighten the blurred area, so it doesn’t overlap into outlines or areas of other other color.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Ben Hale]

I’ll have to try that when I get home from work tonight and see how it does.

To be a little more clear in what I’m asking for, I’m trying to only blur 2 specific colors, and not effect the colors around it. I’ve attached an image to show what I’m going for.

[Walter Soyka]

This look is exactly what the technique I described above will do — though I’m sure there are other ways to accomplish this effect as well.

Once you get all the parameters in the ballpark for a good look for your footage, you can save the whole stack of effects as an animation preset. Then all you will have to do to re-use it is duplicate the layer for each set of colors you want to blend, apply your custom preset, and pick the new colors with the Color Keys’ pickers.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Ben Hale]

Drop shadow or a black layer wouldn’t work because the shadow area would bleed outside of the circle.

Interesting, though, is that your black layer idea is exactly how they did it on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Thanks anyways,

Ben

[Ben Hale]

I’m excited about giving it a try. Thanks for explaining the Animation Presets too, I was weary of having to repeat the process for each pass that I wanted to do on the characters. I’ll post my results when I get a chance.

Thanks,

Ben

[Ben Hale]

Ran into a problem. Your idea was working great past the inverted Alpha section, but once I got to the blur all the problems started. Rather than just pull the colors from within the Alpha channel, it also started pulling from the outside and forming these “halo’s” around the shapes. I’ve attached an image.

The matte choker wasn’t working as well as I’d like so I tried creating an adjustment layer and using the duplicate layer’s Alpha channel to try and contain the blur to only the area masked by the 2 colors. It was still pulling color from outside the Alpha channel. I was really hoping that the “repeat edge pixels” would fix it, but no luck.

I’m open, and appreciative, of any more ideas. Thanks.

Ben

[Walter Soyka]

Does it help if you precompose the layer after adding the color keys and invert alpha, but before the blur and matte choker?

Also, this might be easier to do on the shading itself, instead of the composited final. Do you have the animation in layers somehow?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Ben Hale]

I think I tried precomposing last night, but I’ll give it another shot later. As far as the actual animation, its not layered in a way that the color groups would be separate.

The original idea seems sound, I just can’t get the blur effect to respect any masks that I put on it. Not sure if there are any other “blur type” effects that might give me a similar blending effect without the problems.

Is there a way to get After Effects to trace the shape of the mask I’m creating after the invert Alpha step? I haven’t tested it yet, but the blur filter might not pull outside the mask if it was something drawn with the pen tool. Thought I heard of an auto-trace somewhere, but I could be wrong.

Thanks again for your help.