Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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Even better:
If you want the lines to be horizontal, 2 pixels apart and 1 pixel thick each, make a 1 x 3 pixel PSD.
Fill the top pixel with the color of your choice (this will be the color of the line) and leave the bottom white (if you want the empty space to be white, otherwise you could remove the background and make the empty space transparent).
Then go to Edit > Define Pattern…
You can name the pattern anything you want and it will now be accesible in layer styles and as an option when you Fill (Shift-F5) and choose to use a pattern.
For vertical lines you would make the comp 3 x 1 and put the pixel on the left side. Of course if you want more space you should make the PSD bigger: the thickness of the line + the empty space between.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I think this depends on the plug-in, but its usually by pressing the ‘Options…’ button at the top near the effect name in the effect palette.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I can’t reproduce this. Can you give any other specifics? Have you tried doing this in a new composition with only the 3D layer, the mask and the stroke effect? It could be that some other effect or layer is causing this to happen.
Otherwise you could try pre-composing a 2D stroked layer and making the pre-comp a 3D layer in your final comp.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I think there’s a script floating around that allows you to attach track points to mask vertices. Try searching the forum, it seems like this question is asked more often than any other.
Alternatively you can easily link a masked layer to a tracker.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Dan Ebberts] “Couldn’t you just convert the camera’s position into the plane’s layer space, put the other camera at the same positon except for z”
That was the method I started out pursuing… I hate to admit it but I couldn’t figure out how to go from world space to layer space and back to world space =/
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Well, the idea is essentially to create more realistic reflections in an AE comp, and the method I’m using stems from me remembering that a reflection can be considered a view from a camera that is the reflection of your viewpoint across a 3D plane. This picture should help clarify:
https://img458.imageshack.us/my.php?image=reflectedcamerayn3.jpg
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
The ideal layer mask will have pure white in areas you want to maintain, pure black in areas you don’t and a small gradient running from white to black (mostly gray) at the edges (those small areas that are the boundaries between the black and the white).
During this whole process its important to remember you can use any filter/adjustment on a layer mask (as long as you have the layer mask and not the layer selected!) and that in a layer mask black = transparent, white = opaque, gray = semi-transparent.
First things first, it is often desirable to mask hair and other wispy elements separately from the body. So duplicate your layer and name the new duplicate something like ‘Hair’ and your old one ‘Body.’ Now hide your ‘Body’ layer so you’re just working with ‘Hair.’
You can look at Hair’s layer mask by opt/alt clicking the mask thumbnail in your layers palette. If the edges are too hard and well defined, make sure that you have the layer mask (not the layer) selected and you can use a subtle gaussian blur to feather the edges some.
Alt/opt click on the layer mask again to see what your layer is looking like.
Make sure you still have the layer mask (and not the layer) selected and you can use a levels adjustment on it to either expand or contract the white area of the mask (if you decrease your white input, the arrow on the right, it will expand, if you increase your black input, the arrow on the left, it will contract). If you have background color in your hair then you will likely want to contract the white areas of the mask.
You can do this a few times (blurring then adjusting with levels) until you have something that you like.
Once you have ‘Hair’ looking good you need to hide the portion of the body that is still showing (we want ‘Hair’ to have the hair and ‘Body’ to have the body), you can do this by painting with black in the layer mask (this will hide anything you paint on). Make sure you have the layer mask selected and use your brush tool with black as the foreground color to paint over the majority of the body. Leave all of the hair and the parts where the hair meet the head visible in the ‘Hair’ layer.
Now go back to your ‘Body’ layer and paint the hair areas of the layer mask black (hiding the messy hair with the background color in it). You only need to paint the layer mask in areas where you can see the background color showing through the hair here, if you accidentally paint too far in and part of the head disappears you can use your brush with a white foreground color to paint it back (or ctrl-z to undo).
I hope this wasn’t too much information to handle, if I didn’t give you enough detail in certain parts please let me know!
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I’m rendering right now, so I can’t find the exact location. But under the Animation menu there is an option to ‘Sequence Layers.’ You can sequence them with overlap and cross dissolve or just end to end.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
The batch process has options for choosing the naming conventions of the saved files, but it doesn’t allow for everything.
In the Destination section under File Naming you can see an Example of the way your files will be named, you can change the first part to ‘Document Name’ the second to ‘2 digit serial number’ and the last to ‘extension’ to end up with something like ‘ReallyCoolPicture01.jpg’ for your first picture and ‘AnotherAwesomePicture02.jpg’ for your second.
When you record the Save for Web action, don’t change the name of the file or it will record that name as the name to use when saving every file you apply the action to.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I can’t give you all the information you probably want as I don’t generally work in print (aside from the occasional piece of packaging art), but I can tell you that CMYK behaves in a very different manner than RGB.
RGB is an additive color system (works by adding together light) and CMYK is subtractive (works by subtracting colors from white light). Not only that but Black on a printed page isn’t attainable with 100% K (Black is the K in CMYK), but rather a mixture of CMY and K.
This is all just a means of telling you that CMYK just doesn’t work the same way that RGB does. You could try bringing out more color in your photo after it’s been converted to CMYK, but I really can’t say whether that will give the desired results. Hopefully someone with more print experience can help!
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA