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Mask offset/scale problem for effect.
Hello all!
After weeks trying to achieve an effect I had in mind, and searching a lot of forums I’m sort of lost. The effect on the first image below was made in Illustrator. I planned to make an animated version in AE. It’s a silhouette keyed out, and autotraced for 11 seconds. So I got an animated mask. The effect I try to achieve here is: multiple patterns that are circulating in the body, apart from each other at different speeds. They are a sort of circulating ‘veins’ driven by the animated outer mask. I tried a lot of different things to achieve this effect in AE but everytime I got stuck.I thought the most simple way was to put the Cycore path tools effect: ‘rakka’ on the masks, which puts a layer/pattern X-times along a selected mask. This works well for the outer mask. I can even animate the circulation animation.
The hard part is: the patterns within the silhouette. Somehow I have to duplicate the outer mask, scale/offset it inside, and repeat this for every vein. A normal mask-scale doesn’t work (2nd picture red lines). In Illustrator there is the path-offset effect that works (2nd picture green lines). But I can’t find this option in AE. (it is in the ‘shape layers’ but this doesn’t give the effect I want.)
Ok. a lot of info here.. I hope I’m clear about the problem. Some help with this ‘mask-scale-offset thing’ would be great! Or some other points of view… I doubt if I’m still on the right track or not.
Thanks in advance!
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3 Replies
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Hmm, if you have the masks on individual layers then duping them and moving the
anchor point to the center of where you want to scale down should work for the
insides but the 2 figures would be a manual placement. I haven’t seen a path offset
Like in illustrator. -BReality? What did you make it?
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thanks for the replies!
Well the solids are of exactly the same resolution and pixel aspect ratio as the original footage. What I’m trying to achieve here (let’s take the 2nd picture as example) is to duplicate the black lines mask, and then ‘scale’ it down so that I get the effect like the green lines within the black lines. In Illustrator this can be done with negative-offsetting the path. In AE scaling the mask down results in just smaller figures (red lines) that don’t fit withinin the black lines. So the free transform tool doesn’t work either 🙁 And it’s about the outline of the masks. The masks themselves are disabled (put on ‘NONE’). So working with the mask expansion isn’t an option either.
Hope I’m clear in explaining this 🙂
Thanks for trying to help already! -
Well… then I get that scale problem I told about earlier. I need the masks to go inside this first mask, like the first picture I posted. Just scaling/free transforming it, results in a mask that doesn’t ‘fit’ inside the original…
but this night I got an idea, and it worked. Choking the original footage and than autotrace it multiple times with everytime a different choke value to give different sized masks. Then apply the effect on those masks.
Thanks again for the input, because it got me thinking in other directions.
Case closed 🙂
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