[Ben Hale]

I really appreciate you looking into it for me. I’ve been all over the internet with no success. One way I was getting it to work was by making the photo area completely green and then just using keylight in After Effects. Not the greatest work around but it was doing the trick. Problem I’m running into with that is where the green would be seen in other object’s reflections.

Do you know of a way to make an object not show up in reflections or reflect as a different color? Thanks.

[Ben Hale]

I was really hoping this would help, but I’m still having the same problem. My situation is slightly different in that I have modeled a picture frame and used the object buffer to punch a hold in the middle of the frame. The object buffer is slightly smaller and giving me that white edge line when I try to composite it in After Effects. Would love to hear any theories you may have. I switched everything to Linear and it still didn’t work.

[Ben Hale]

Wish I had a solution for you, but I’m just writing to see if you found out a way to fix it? Could definitely use some help.

[Ben Hale]

I think I tried precomposing last night, but I’ll give it another shot later. As far as the actual animation, its not layered in a way that the color groups would be separate.

The original idea seems sound, I just can’t get the blur effect to respect any masks that I put on it. Not sure if there are any other “blur type” effects that might give me a similar blending effect without the problems.

Is there a way to get After Effects to trace the shape of the mask I’m creating after the invert Alpha step? I haven’t tested it yet, but the blur filter might not pull outside the mask if it was something drawn with the pen tool. Thought I heard of an auto-trace somewhere, but I could be wrong.

Thanks again for your help.

[Ben Hale]

Ran into a problem. Your idea was working great past the inverted Alpha section, but once I got to the blur all the problems started. Rather than just pull the colors from within the Alpha channel, it also started pulling from the outside and forming these “halo’s” around the shapes. I’ve attached an image.

The matte choker wasn’t working as well as I’d like so I tried creating an adjustment layer and using the duplicate layer’s Alpha channel to try and contain the blur to only the area masked by the 2 colors. It was still pulling color from outside the Alpha channel. I was really hoping that the “repeat edge pixels” would fix it, but no luck.

I’m open, and appreciative, of any more ideas. Thanks.

Ben

[Ben Hale]

I’m excited about giving it a try. Thanks for explaining the Animation Presets too, I was weary of having to repeat the process for each pass that I wanted to do on the characters. I’ll post my results when I get a chance.

Thanks,

Ben

[Ben Hale]

Drop shadow or a black layer wouldn’t work because the shadow area would bleed outside of the circle.

Interesting, though, is that your black layer idea is exactly how they did it on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Thanks anyways,

Ben

[Ben Hale]

I’ll have to try that when I get home from work tonight and see how it does.

To be a little more clear in what I’m asking for, I’m trying to only blur 2 specific colors, and not effect the colors around it. I’ve attached an image to show what I’m going for.