[Filip Vandueren]

This is a really stupid little thing you have to know, I stumbled on it once by accident:

Open Curves.
Make a curve, then convert it using the little pencil icon, all the vertices will disappear,
You can now edit every single pont of the curve .

If you now save the curve, it will be a an .amp-file instead of a .acv file.
That .amp file can be loaded as an arbitrary map in AE-filters like glow I believe.

[Filip Vandueren]

I find Difference mattes work pretty good if the footage is not too noisy, and when backgrounds are fairly even coloured.

Here’s a clip I did this week using Difference Mattes, levels, and some cleaning up by animating black or white brush strokes set to overlay:

(Work in progress):
https://www.vandueren.be/stubru_afrekening_25.mov

The clips were filmed with a (DV) Canon XL2, on a white background, people wore black clothes, gloves, with faces painted black.
Glasses were white.

[Filip Vandueren]

IMHO, response time is a bit overrated.

16 ms just means that if you have a perfectly bright 100% white pixel and you switch it off, it takes 16ms to fade to black.
That corresponds to less than half a frame @ 30FPS.

This is negligible when compared to how long your Eyes and brain would take to “fade out” that white pixel if it had indeed gone to black instantaneously, it’s calle dPErsistence of vision, and as you might know, it is the effect that cinema & animation were based upon.

Of course if you’re playing Unreal Tournament @ 75 FPS, one could argue that it takes longer to fade out a pixel than to update the screen. But still.

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Lars,

there’s not really a direct way to draw a spline through 3 points that you can animate.
a broken line would be no problem: that can be made with two “beam” effects that you combine.

You could try with bending, but then the bend will always be in the middle…
I’m thinking in the lines of this:

make the leg in photoshop as one layer, rigid:

Open, then precomp it after effects so it has lots and lots of transparancy around it:
make the precomp three times as wide as the leg is high.
and 1.5 times as high as the leg is high:

Set the Anchorpoint of the precomped leg to the pivotpoint of the hip:

add a “Distort->CC Bend It” filter
give the Start-point “parameter” this expression: "anchorPoint"
Now move the End-point to the bottom of the foot, it’s best to make sure its X-value is the same as the Start-X value, so the two points are directly underneath eachother:

Give the layer’s rotation this expression: value - effect("CC Bend It")("Bend")*(0.9)
This will subtract a value from the current rotation, if you bend 100% it will rotate -90

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Lars,

there’s not really a direct way to draw a spline through 3 points that you can animate.
a broken line would be no problem: that can be made with two “beam” effects that you combine.

You could try with bending, but then the bend will always be in the middle…
I’m thinking in the lines of this:

make the leg in photoshop as one layer, rigid:

Open, then precomp it after effects so it has lots and lots of transparancy around it:
make the precomp three times as wide as the leg is high.
and 1.5 times as high as the leg is high:

Set the Anchorpoint of the precomped leg to the pivotpoint of the hip:

add a “Distort->CC Bend It” filter
give the Start-point “parameter” this expression: "anchorPoint"
Now move the End-point to the bottom of the foot, it’s best to make sure its X-value is the same as the Start-X value, so the two points are directly underneath eachother:

Give the layer’s rotation this expression: value - effect("CC Bend It")("Bend")*(0.9)
This will subtract a value from the current rotation, if you bend 100% it will rotate -90

[Filip Vandueren]

De lichtstralen van Shine zijn altijd 2D dus je moet het inderdaad faken met 2 comps.
Misschien is het handiger om een 2e comp te maken waarin alleen de “te shinen”-layer aanstaat, ipv te masken.

BTW: ik weet niet of er offici

[Filip Vandueren]

De lichtstralen van Shine zijn altijd 2D dus je moet het inderdaad faken met 2 comps.
Misschien is het handiger om een 2e comp te maken waarin alleen de “te shinen”-layer aanstaat, ipv te masken.

BTW: ik weet niet of er offici

[Filip Vandueren]

Yeah Nils,

I was thinking about it a little more and came to the same conclusion…
Depending on how you place the layers you fly through in 3D, there could be as little as 2 layers needed/ visible at one time…

With some clever expression fumbling, the layers that are no longer visible could jump from behind the camera that passed them, to a new position behind the next layer, and also update their time-remapping so they now show the correct frame, in time before they become visible…
If that makes any sense. 😎

I did something like that once to create a quasi-infinite floor using about 4 large layers.

If you can draw a sketch or post an example project using solids, that shows how you want to move the cam, I could figure out the expressions for you.

[Filip Vandueren]

Yeah Nils,

I was thinking about it a little more and came to the same conclusion…
Depending on how you place the layers you fly through in 3D, there could be as little as 2 layers needed/ visible at one time…

With some clever expression fumbling, the layers that are no longer visible could jump from behind the camera that passed them, to a new position behind the next layer, and also update their time-remapping so they now show the correct frame, in time before they become visible…
If that makes any sense. 😎

I did something like that once to create a quasi-infinite floor using about 4 large layers.

If you can draw a sketch or post an example project using solids, that shows how you want to move the cam, I could figure out the expressions for you.

[Filip Vandueren]

Try using a layer mode on the blurred copy like soft/hard light, overlay, or even screen or add, reduce the opacity as neede