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Feathering a shape path
Being an old school AE guy, I thought I’d venture into some new territory and decieded to use a Shape layer instead of my tried and true mask on white solid technique.
HOW do you feather the edges of the bezier path inside the Shape Layer without adding a blur to the whole layer?
And while I’m at it… why can’t I directly apply tracking data to each path’s transform? This should be on the “Edit Target” drop down of the tracker controls.
And last, when am I going to be able to track individual points of a bezier path? CS10?
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4 Replies
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For feathering a shape, you need to link the shape to a mask and then use a tool like PV Feather (www.revisionfx.com,$70).
Note it’s a very limited workflow as the link happens before the shape transforms. You can also simply make a color solid and draw a shape with masks and use PV Feather on that (there is also a fill tool in AE to color a mask shape). As far as tracking shape vertices (publishing to UI shape/mask vertices), well you are probably the 10000th user to ask the same thing. 🙁
Pierre
http://www.revisionfx.com -
Everytime I run into one of these limitations I realise how great a much more expensive tool like Smoke is. Smoke allows you to track individual vertices as well as the shape axis. It also gives you advanced gradient controls like your PV Feather plug-in. Once you are spoiled with having these tools, it’s hard to go without them.
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well, you can’t track individual mask points, etc… a long-time gripe for me, in fact.
but as for shape layers you can either blur the layer, or if you’re using a primitive shape like an elipse, just use a gradient fill and make the grad’s alpha fade toward the edges.
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I know this post is old, but I was also wondering what the best way to do this was and didn’t find many answers, so I wanted to mention another solution.
Basically you make a track matte and blur the edge and apply it to the shape.
Steps:
1. Duplicate the shape layer
2. Apply blur
3. Reduce scale
4. Set as track matte alpha for the original layerIt’s a shame you cant just apply an inside-out gradient to the stroke of a shape layer that would produce a feathered edge?
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