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Laser pointer effect
I need to simulate the effect of a hand-held laser pointer on a set of slides. What would be the best way to both create a realistic looking laser point and then animate it?
Paul Bean
Joshua Tree Productions
Las Vegas, Nevada -
8 Replies
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ok, well a few questions befor we can answer your question
A) are you just trying to get a red dot? or a whole beam
B) the motion, is it all over the screan, how still or how much movment,
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Create a red solid. Use the circle mask tool to create a circle. Feather the mask to get a soft edge. Switch through the transfer modes to see which one has a more “glowy” feeling over your slide footage. I’m thinking trying ADD, Overlay, Color Dodge (or Burn), Linear light, etc. Then obviosly adjust the opacity to taste.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Effects > Render > Beam.
Wonder why Chris didn’t mention it? 😉 Maybe because it was so an easy and quick response. Or maybe I didn’t get you question clearly?
If you have Particle Illusion they have a lot of laser emitters you can configure and transform them as you like.
As for me, I had to do a laser beam for some company 2 days ago. What I did is I took the Beam effect, animated it, duplicated it, put some big blur on the duplicated one, putted a displacement map effect around to give the idea that near the laser it was very hot and just applied a little Shine from Trapcode on it. Sparkles from DigiEffects and smoke from Trapcode Particular.
There you have it. But again, that ain’t really a laser, but a beam.
Hope that helped.
Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.0 Professional -
It’s my interpretation he just wants the dot like a gun laser on a forehead look.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
I just need the dot. Then have the dot move around on the slide in a natural hand-held way.
Thanks for your help.
Paul
Paul Bean
Joshua Tree Productions
Las Vegas, Nevada -
Create a path with the wiggler function, convert the path to keyframe data and put the data in the positionproperty of the dot.
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Create the red-dot as Chris describes above, but then try adding the “Glow” filter to the dot. This would look _especially_ nice in AE7 using 32bit color space.
Play around w) the “Glow” effect’s properties until you get the halo you want, and then as Chris said try playing with the entire layer’s transfer mode to finish it off.
Animate the layer as you normally would, apply an Easy-ease to your keyframes and make curve-handle adjustments as needed.
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Use Motion Sketch to give the dot an erratic hand held feel.
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