[Aronduby]

The only tutorial that I can think of was Andrew Kramer’s Simulated Lighting Effect, he does that in the video, but I don’t think he went over it. https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/lighting/index.html

If I were to sit down and make the blow back effect right now, I would save the frame I want the blow back on as a psd from afx. Then I would silhouette the gun with one layer being the top part thats back, and another layer with the barrel showing. Import it back into afx, probably as comp-doc size to make lining up simple, and maybe add a little blur to the blow back.

[Aronduby]

I’ve done something similar using a custom shatter map to make hearts with a 3d depth fall down over the footage and used a linear transition on the footage, and it looked pretty good. I’m thinking you could use that same technique for bubbles with the shatter and then use that as your matte.

[Aronduby]

Joe Chao did a tutorial along these same lines using Particular, sounds like it would be helpful in this situation.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/chao_joe/firefly/index.html

[Aronduby]

the wireframe definetly 3d, but if you didn’t have 3d software you could use trapcode 3d stroke, but that would be a whole lot of instances and a rather huge pain.

[Aronduby]

I’ve done both exporting to PS and animating a mask, both take alot of time, but I definetly perfer animating the mask.

Something that has worked well for me in the past is starting the intial shape keyframe at the first frame and doing the mask there, and then moving to the last frame and move the points around there, and then go half way between those and do it again. Then repeat moving the points around inbetween all of the keyframes. If there’s not a whole lot of motion going on in the shoot you can save alot of work and let the interpolation do its thing.

I’ve had some luck with that method masking people talking with hand gestures, but it didn’t work well with people dancing. I think it helps with some of the monotony of the work.

[Aronduby]

I’ve had some luck in creating cigarette smoke using white particles and then applying a blur to them, you could try that.

[Aronduby]

my first thought is using wave world, which creates B&W wave ripple pattern, as a displacement map. If you go that route don’t forget to precomp the solid layer you applied the plug-in to with “move all attributes” since AFX can’t use effects for displacement.

[Aronduby]

my first thought is using wave world, which creates B&W wave ripple pattern, as a displacement map. If you go that route don’t forget to precomp the solid layer you applied the plug-in to with “move all attributes” since AFX can’t use effects for displacement.

[Aronduby]

>>The best solution you can probably come up with is to create a master script and create a palette for your scripts.

I think I may have found my next project, thanks for the idea.

[Aronduby]

ok, so I figured it out, and figured out a better way to do it, using markers instead of text layers. I would love to get some feedback and ways I could clean this up, because I’m fairly sure I can since its my first script. Alot of it is based off of a script from Lee Brimelow, but I’m still really proud of it.

{//scope limiter

//if there’s no layer named cuePoints in the active comp alert the user
if(app.project.activeItem.layer(“cuePoints”)==null){
alert(“active comp must contain a layer name cuePoints”);
}
else{//if we have the proper layers
var out = filePutDialog(“Select an Output File”, “cuePointsData.txt”, “txt”);//create a text file

var cues = app.project.activeItem.layer(“cuePoints”).property(“Marker”);//the markers on the cuePoints layer

//get the starting and delimiter values from the user
var start = prompt(“Enter the code that you want to precede the property values:\n\n\tExample: var cues:Array = [“,”var cues:Array = [“);
var delim = prompt(“Enter the character that will separate the values:”,”,”);

//open our new file for writing and write the start from the user
out.open(“w”);
out.write(start);

var prevComment = “”;//empty variable, used to keep the same marker from being repeated in the file
var j = 0;//a counter to tell the loop not to insert the delimiter at the begining

//loop through activeComp by frames
for(var i=0;i