[John Cuevas]

Go back to comp mode, select the layer with the paint effect and press “E” to reveal the effects and twirl open “Paint” You have some options here, you can individually change each paint layer to be a different transfer mode. Or you can change the paint toggle “Paint on Transparent” to on. Now you can use that as an alpha matte for the layer below if you want. Or you could animate the brush strokes to reveal a layer by animating the start and end parameters under the stroke options.

Each brush stroke also has parameters that can be further adjusted, color,

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I think I’m following. Couldn’t you use paint on the image and then when you are finished, just click the paint effect and change the mode to “Paint on Transparent” And if you want you could put another copy of the image below that layer?

I’m not sure what you mean by the mask as I think that means something different in photoshop than it does in AE. Perhaps I’m not fully understanding what you are trying to accomplish.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

This might not be the most elegant solution, but you could use the (name your own price)Decompose Text script to break all your blocks of text into individual lines. Then just add the random fade up effect to each line of text and offset the keyframes.

When you download the scrip, navigate to your adobe-> support ->scripts -> ScriptUI Panels folder and place the DecomposeText.jsx file there.

Then when your run AE again, select your text layer and go to windows and run the script.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Looks great, makes me tempted to buy element.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I don’t understand why you can’t see the layer? I just dropped a jpeg into a comp, opened up it’s layer window, selected the paintbrush and started tracing around the picture(badly, but I can still see everything).

When you are in the layer window, do you have view set to “Paint” and the Render box checked?

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I had to simulate writing on a chalkboard for a series of educational videos once. What I did was animated every letter A to Z and numbers 0-9 once and then just dropped them into the project as needed. Course this only works with printed letters, not script…but I thought I would throw it out there.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Take a look at the tutorial Mark linked(or the Michael Park one in my link). Once you complete that you would be able to create your own rotating planet. (In my sample project, full credit goes to Michael Park for the rotating globe—-Creating a Realistic 3d Earth using only AE)

Create a new composition and call it “Lower Third”

Step 1 is to create a solid (cntl + y) and mask it, name this layer the “lower third BKG”. Duplicate the layer, name it “lower third mask”, place it on the top of the layer stack and change it’s mode to “Stencil Alpha”

Take the planet composition and drop it into the “Lower Third” composition. Scale it down and move to the bottom right corner. Place it below the “lower third mask” layer.

Finally you would make add the lines, text and gradient to your layer order, placing everything below the stencil. The stencil creates a boundary for every layer placed below it. In my example I added a linear wipe to the stencil so that the lower third wipes on to the screen.

My quick example project: 4670_lowerthirdproject.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Are you looking to create the world or just the placement of it? in a lower third? Do you already have a world graphic?

Tom, the file is just a .png, i downloaded and it’s safe.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Either Lower-thirds or supers are the terms I’ve heard the most.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Trapcodes 3D Stroke probably will accomplish what you want. Go to Red Giant and download a trial and see if it’s what you need.

You could check out Plexus also at AE sctipts. About 2 minutes into the demo it looks to be doing what you want, but I’ve never used it, so I’m can’t say for sure it will do exactly what you need.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.