Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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Write-On is more of a pain then Stroke as it requires an extra step of pasting data into the position property.
Masks can definitely be open-ended (similar to your description of paths) and don’t necessarily need to hide or reveal anything (you can change a mask from ‘Add’ to ‘None’).
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[tduncan777] “Correction, I believe he did manually pen the mask because it is not as perfect as I described. Also the same letters have different masks.”
Just to expand on this, a technique that people often use is typing text out using a font and then revealing it with a manual Stroke set to ‘Reveal Original.’
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[tduncan777] “It’s driving me nuts how he made these masks. Or were they done in PS or AI and copied in? All that I can find in tutorials and help is about making an “outline”, not an inner stroke.
This also got me thinking, what is the difference between a path, a mask, a stroke and an outline? Aren’t they really the same thing in AE?”
If it looks sloppy he probably just drew some masks out in AE, if he did it in Illustrator it should have worked a bit better unless the goal was sloppiness.
A path is generally used to refer to a motion path along which layers, lights, or cameras move, these can exist in 3D space.
A mask is similar to custom shapes and paths in Photoshop and can be drawn closed or open ended (you’re dealing with an open ended one).
A stroke is an effect that is applied to a layer, it uses a mask as an input.
The only place I’ve seen ‘outline’ used in AE is the ‘Create Outlines’ function for text, which creates a new layer with masks on it corresponding to the vectors of the font on the text layer.
So as you can see these are all related, but should be thought of differently.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I’m confused about why you need to mask anything. It sounds like this is a top down perspective of photos floating to rest on a flat plane? Where does the masking come in?
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
My suggestion would be looking at CC Glass (turn distortion way down) or upgrading to CS3 which has full support for Photoshop Layer Styles. I made some cool text in AE today with a metallic beveled stroke around it and then animated the global light to get a sheen effect, it was nice for 3 minutes of work =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Click the button at the top of the timeline on the far left, it should be called Live Update.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
An alternate method to this that would give you a less desirable result (so why am i mentioning it?!) is to duplicate your lens flare layer and make it a Luma Track Matte for the original lens flare (assuming they’re both on black solids).
You could also pre-comp the layer and apply Channel > Set Matte to it, then set it to take its alpha from its own luminance.
Just an exercise in thinking through the problem =) The problem with these approaches is that there would be black fringing around the flare, which would not appear with unmult as it removes the black from the image.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Lord Scales] “So, is there an “infinity value” inside of expressions in AE? Because actually the 3D Space is infinity, so the length of something from the camera can be infinity also.”
No… it can’t. I think by ‘infinite’ you’re thinking of ‘really big number.’
minVal = 0.1;
maxVal = 500;
dist = length (thisComp.activeCamera.position, thisComp.layer ("Null 1").position);
linear (dist, 0, (here I want an "infinity value"), maxVal, minVal)
If you could actually put an ‘infinty value’ in there then your linear function would always return maxVal because ‘dist’ could never approach infinity. Infinity is not a number, it’s a concept of limitlessness.
Any number divided by 0 is equivalent to infinity, but dividing by 0 gives an error in computing because the computer has to have a number as its result and infinity is not a number!
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[jkb242] “Thanks Darby, I will try the edge feature you mentioned. The masking is primarily for texts in which I am attemptin to create write-on or paint effects but simply capturing the exact dimensions of each letter can get a bit tricky and difficult to manage. The edge setting you mention could simply this effort.”
I think you’re misunderstanding me. There is no ‘edge setting,’ the pen is a tool that defines with boundaries/edges of masks/areas and that’s all it does.
Look at the AE help file for more information (F1).
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Since the rule of thirds applies to the position in the frame, as opposed to the position in 3D ‘world’ space, I imagine there will be plenty of use of toComp() in the expression.
I’d like to play with this idea as well if I have some time today.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA