[Jonah Benes]

Not possible?

[Jonah Benes]

Sigh…

Life just keeps getting more and more complicated…

🙂

[Jonah Benes]

I understand the difference you are going for…

Sadly, like you, I will be watching the thread with interest in the hope of learning how to do it…

[Jonah Benes]

Experts here will have better solutions I’m sure…

But a quick starting point might be, as the smoke starts to appear and rise:

1. add an increasing blur filter to the dancer

2. add a decreasing opacity

2a. maybe add a decreasing color saturation to make the dancer’s coloring more similar to the smoke

3. keyframe an increasing crop from the bottom (edge feathered) to correspond to the smoke rising up over the dancer’s image

– And you could also use the alpha channel of the dancer to have it filled completely with a dancer-shapped silhouette of smoke. That wouldn’t help so much with the dissipating but could be a step in the right direction.

– I haven’t seen that AE tutorial, so I don’t know if something like the “magician smoke effect” is sufficient or if you’re looking more for something out of ILM.

[Jonah Benes]

This is probably just an academic theoretical question…

But on the 1% chance it is possible, it could be a workaround of sorts.

I don’t know much about the file format that Motion uses for the text it creates…

But would it be possible to convert a still image to that format in order to import it and then utilize the Text Behaviors?

[Jonah Benes]

I know.

It baffles me that they would import all of the behaviors into Motion, but then go out of their way to limit their application.

That’s actually extra work and programming from just shipping them over from Livetype as-is…

Oh well…

[Jonah Benes]

Thanks for the reply…

I’ve watched and appreciated several of your tutorial videos.

I had figured that most of the effects could be recreated somehow in Motion (although I have no idea why they would eliminate the one click functionality).

Recreating the Livetype behaviors on still images with that process is still a step beyond me I think…

I don’t expect a quick response to this…

But if you get a minute at some point it might get my approach on track.

Take something like “Manifest In” for text…

If I want to do that with a still image…I suppose I have to…

1. Use some sort of wispy flame generator and keyframe its movement to travel across where the image will be…
2. As it travels across, the image, have the opacity of the image gradually increase and probably have a keyframed crop reduction on the image (with edge feather)…
3. Looks like it is also keyframing a reduction in blur on the text / image…

Do you think this would be a good starting point, or would you approach the problem differently?