pangea animation problems – any ideas?

[Steve Roberts]

It depends on how many intermediate steps you have to work with (from “then” to “now”), how complex the land masses are and how accurate you want them to be.

Here are some thoughts:
– Drawing a mask for a land mass can be an incrdible pain if you want a detailed coastline.
– Animating between two mask shapes can give unpredictable results. You may need to use Smart Mask Interpolation and/or tweak the intermediate mask shapes.
– If the museum supplies data on intermediate stages of the transition, you should use them for accuracy.
– If the museum can give you vector files for the land masses, you don’t have to draw them.
– Morphing might blur or soften edges.
– If you want to try morphing, you should download the demo for Re:Flex, which is very good.
– Basically, morphing may be easier, but animating between vector shapes may be more accurate.

If I were given the job, I’d have to look at all the materials before making a choice of workflow. Hope that helps …

[Mylenium]

Regardless of which route you take, you’ll have to have animated masks. Even morphing won’t be automatic. I’d animate the rough continental shapes from this day and age to form Pangea, pre-compose them and using Auto Trace get masks which then could be refined. Somewhere along the road you’ll have to do a simple morph combinmed with a dissolve.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Travis Turner]

great – thanks for the replies guys – this is still in the very beginning stages of production so I’ll take your advice and might bug you again if i hit any walls down the road –
thanks again –

[Majorasshole]

my advice is to animate the vector shapes
make all your major keyframe shapes in illustrator and then import them and animate them in AE as vectors

using flash might also be an option to create the vector transitions. it likes moving vector shapes