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Outlines on a Silhouette Animation
I have an animated silhouette rigged with Duik and CC 2015. Since it’s a silhouette and all one flat color without a stroke, I lose definition when an arm goes in front of the body. If the character is folding his arms, for instance. Therefore, I want to outline overlapping parts of the silhouette, but don’t want the whole thing to have a permanent outline.
Is there a way to somehow mask an outline so it only appears when there’s some kind of overlapping of parts? I’m thinking about using a part of the body as a matte so that outline is only visible when the arm is in front of the body. I can’t precomp parts of the animation because of the rig. Is this kind of setup feasible?
Thank you!
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3 Replies
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Hey John, You might try using the “stroke” layer style on a duplicate of the part you want to have a border around, like an arm, and use that as an alpha matte for the part it is going to be in front of, like the body. Here’s an example project file:
9032_strokematteexample.aep.zip
Erik Waluska
EAWmedia -
Thanks for your suggestion Erik, this is exactly what I was expecting to be able to do.
But character rigs are a lot more complicated than simple shapes… Duplicating just the arm wreaks havoc with the IK expressions and the animation, which means I’d have to duplicate the whole character and hide everything but the arm – not a problem, though it would make the project that much more complicated.
Also, I’m having issues applying a Stroke to anything other than an individual path or shape. The arm of my character is in two parts, plus the IK animation controllers. So it would have to be a precomp with a stroke applied. But the effect doesn’t work that way, and I can’t find something that could be applied to get the same effect.
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That does sound pretty complicated. Sorry I can’t be of more help. Good luck with the project.
Erik Waluska
EAWmedia
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