track matte of a track matte?

[Darby Edelen]

Something like that may be possible but it depends somewhat on the specifics of your situation. Can you describe what it is you’re trying to achieve? What kind of assets are you using (footage, stills, 3D layers, shape layers, etc)?

In general I’d recommend the Set Matte effect but the implementation varies depending on the specifics.

Darby Edelen

[Tom Gomez]

For all intents and purposes, let’s say it three shape layers.

Naturally the one on top is the alpha matte for the second.

Why can’t the third assign the track-matted second as it’s track matte? That would be so nice if it did…

There are lots of ways to do the masking I’m after, but because of crazily nested and expressioned elements, they are all a pain! 🙂

But I’ll mess with Set Matte. I’ve never really used that. THANKS DARBY!

I would be great if someone could tell me why AE doesn’t let you do a stacked series of mattes though.

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[Darby Edelen]

Set Matte is a perfect candidate for Shape Layers or any other layers with the continuously rasterize/collapse transformations switch enabled.

Darby Edelen

[Walter Soyka]

[Tom Durham] “I would be great if someone could tell me why AE doesn’t let you do a stacked series of mattes though.”

My guess is that it presents a recursion problem: you have to render the matte layer before rendering the layer it cuts. This is an inversion of the standard rendering order, and creating a stack of these could require an awful lot of out-of-order rendering, so it may not fit neatly into the internal rendering pipeline.

That said — this shouldn’t be impossible and stacked mattes would make a fantastic feature request [link].

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Tom Durham] “I can’t precomp because of crazy expressions, etc.”

I should note that you can use expressions across comps. You can even pickwhip from one to another if you tear off the tabs of the timeline windows so you can see more than one timeline at the same time.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve visually BUT if you set the top-most layer’s Blending Mode to Stencil Alpha, you will be able to cut into the alpha matte construct of the lower two layers.

Of course there could be more than two layers below the Stencil Alpha Layer AND of course you can have multiple layers with the Stencil Alpha Blending Effect. Incidentally, the latter is another option for your specific case of three layers with two layers acting as mattes.

HTH
RoRK

Intensive mocha & AE Training in Singapore and Other Dangerous Locations

Imagineer Systems (mocha) Certified Instructor
& Adobe After Effects CS6 ACE

[Tom Gomez]

Awesome! Thanks Roland I’ll give it a shot!

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