looking for a simple generate plugin

[Darby Edelen]

It sounds like Corner Pin may not work for you, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind. CC Power Pin may work better.

You might get better results for a triangle by setting one of the 4 points of the corner pin to the average of the 2 nearest points. This will place that pin exactly at the center of the other 2 and prevent the pinching (or other odd behavior) you might get at the corner when setting two points equal to one another.

So, for example, set the Bottom Right pin to the average of the Bottom Left and Top Right pins: (Bottom Left Position + Top Right Position) / 2.

You might also consider using CC Power Pin on a comp sized solid and enabling the continuously rasterize switch. That may increase processing overhead some but it should help keep the edges clean.

Darby Edelen

[Arne Münch]

thanks Darby for your quick reply

I tried CC Power Pin as well, but the edges look the same dirty(is if there were not any anti-aliasing) plus the whole layer seems to disappear in some occasions. I also tried the trick with the fourth point set to the center of the two nearest, but the edges doesn´t look fine. Continuously rasterization doesn´t seem to have any effect on this.

At the moment I am working with corner pin plus three beam effects for the edges in the same color, but this is also not perfect. Sometimes you get small holes in-between, if you do not set your beams thickness high enough, but this also may not look how you want it.

I was hoping there is a simple effect that just renders simple forms like triangles, but maybe there isn´t.

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Have you looked at Plexus?

https://aescripts.com/plexus/

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Kevin Camp]

iris wipe can generate a simple triangle — equilateral, with radius control for size.

if something that simple works for you, adding invert, set to effect alpha would reverse the triangular hole to be a triangle.

for an irregular triangle, i’ve used your 3-beam-effect method, but used expressions to link the endpoints to point controls on the same layer, thus behaving a bit more like an effect. i also used then the paint bucket effect to fill the triangles (with an expression to keep the fill point between the point controls).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Arne Münch]

hi kevin
thanks for your reply
iris wipe can generate a triangle, but as you say, there are no controls for the corners, so you can use a shape layer triangle just as well.
I also tried your trick with the paint bucket, but if you do animations, where a triangle gets really sharp and maybe switches to its “negative” side, you get problems with the paint bucket exactly in that switching transition, it suddenly fills out everything else but not the triangle for a frame or so.

I think its some kind of strange that its not natively in AE possible to generate simple polygons by controlling their vertices.
I had also expected that someone familiar with writing plugins would have written such a thing, but after long time searching the web I just found
https://aescripts.com/bao-mask-avenger/
for 150 Dollar, which is quite expensive.