Shape Masks/Gradient

[Michael Szalapski]

No. If you convert them to shape layers in AE, you can set a fill in AE. However, it may be easier to give them a fill in Illustrator if you’re more familiar with it.

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[Ben Lewis]

Ok i’ll give that a go but am I changing the fill layer to white or black? I want to retain the original look of the graphics with the white outline. Once i’ve created the animated gauge will I need to rebuild the graphic? Sorry to be so thick!

[Michael Szalapski]

There are a couple of solutions to your issue. If you make them shape layers in AE, you can have them in the precomp with a fill (and no stroke) and it won’t matter what color it is – you’ll just use the alpha for an alpha matte. Then, in your main comp, have another copy of them with just the outline.

If you fill the shapes in Illustrator, you could make the fill black, then keep a copy of it in the main comp set to screen (so you have the outlines). Then, in the precomp, put them over a white background and use that precomp as an inverted luma matte.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Ben Loogman]

Hi guys,

I have sort of the same problem only I want to make a mask from an effect.

I am working on a project related to music, and I am using therefore the Audio Spectrum effect.

1) What I now want to do is use the analog line as a border for a mask. The part underneath the line I want to fill with a color, but above the line must be transparant to see the layers behind it.
See pic for extra explanation.
https://nl.tinypic.com/r/2dlnoxu/8

Is this possibel and how do I do it?

2) Also I want to use the effect 2 times in the same shot. Now what I can do is put another audio spectrum into the project and do the same thing. However I want to keep the render time as short as possible and adding another audio spectrum will not enhance this.

So it is possible to sort of duplicate the effect? That is just will look at the first audio spectrum and copy past it somewhere else in the shot.

Hope you guys can help me out.

[Ben Lewis]

Hi! I finally figured this one out with help from a friend. I was building a “progress bar’ type graphic so I drew a number of curved rectangles on one shape layer. These were outlines only. Then I duplicated that layer and switched the outlines to fill. This all had to be in white as I was told to use a track matte. In a separate comp I build a gradient bar and animated using a mask. I precomposed it and added this to my progress bar comp. The trick is to get the correct layer hierarchy.

8695_screenshot20150331at23.40.14.png.zip