[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

There’s a two-week course worth of questions there, but let’s start with the green screen.

You can google for “green screen lighting” which is (in addition to the quality of your camera) just about the most important thing about shooting green screen, and “green screen keying”, which is the procedure of how you remove that green background and put something else there.

Using green screen you can put another background behind you, but you don’t need green screen to replace the piano, if that’s all you want to do.

I take that you want to replace the piano you are playing with another piano that looks better?

The make it (relatively) simple, don’t use angles where you or your hands are in front of the piano (the part you are trying to replace), as that will make it way more complicated, unless you want to spray paint your piano green (joke). Basically, don’t put anything (moving) between the camera and (those parts of) the piano you want to replace. Note that if you want to show your fingers on the keyboard, you’d shoot in from an angle where your fingers would always be in front of the keyboard and not covering other parts of the piano. Then you will be able to compose it without getting into rotoscoping — wherein you would make a career out of being a rotoscope artist rather than a pianist.

A still image will do if it is high enough quality and matches the angle. So, you’d have to start by finding the photos first, then planning the shoot based on those angles.

Now, just slapping still image of a piano will look like a still image of a piano slapped on top of footage for a number of reasons. There are several things that will have to match between the footage and the added elements, the first one is lighting. So, you’d have to take that into account. How are the photos of the piano lit? Match it the best you can.

Then color: The brigthness and the temperature (warm/cold) of the lighting need to match.

Grain: There is animated noise, or grain, in footage that is absent (or still) in still images. You need to add that in in the right amount.

Other things that you may encounter. Shadows and reflections: if the piano is a shiny surface, it will reflect, so you’ll need to add reflections of yourself if the camera angle requires such. Or shadows, if the lighting is such. both relatively complex matters.

And so on…

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Here’s the basic idea for the tentacle motion with delay.

The motion of the “body” is a simple wiggle, the tentacle follows it automatically.

AE CC2014.

9644_tentacle.aep.zip

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Expressions and nulls to control puppet pin positions with a master control.

Basically, you would have a slider control for the jellyfish sideways motion (open/close) and each tentacle would have and expression that reads that slider setting, with a time delay as you move down the tentacle. The tentacles themselves are straight (or almost straight) pieces that are distorted with the puppet pin tool.

You would have a null at the beginning of the tentacle that was the master null for that tentacle. It would be controlled by the main slider and it would be parented to the main body.

It is fairly complex to set up one, but with some foresight you can set it up so that once done with one you can duplicate one tentacle as many times as you want, and the animation will be the same.

In brief, creating a time delay expression for the motion is the key here.

(On top of that, there is a wave or turbulent displace effect to make it even more organic as if the water is moving.)

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

In theory (and in practice in most cases) Adobe reads the Windows fonts folder for fonts.

So, you don’t see any fonts in the Character panel? The pull-down list is empty?

And you’re not talking about the Character Styles panel?

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Right-click on the position value and select “separate dimensions”.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

It would be very cumbersome and rendering would slow down to a grind after about 30 seconds of animation, as you would have to calculate the speed based on the tachometer values for every preceding frame from the beginning of the animation to the current frame. Moreover, you would have to take into account the gear shifting to make it realistic, so even more calculation.

Much easier to just do it with two sliders, simulating the relationship.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Since there are 30 pieces that make one full cycle around the track, the idea is to make the track consist of 30 layers, each with an offset of 1/30th of a full cycle. Layer index numbers can be used for this, doesn’t even matter which layer numbers they are for this purpose as any adjacent 30 layers would fill the track. So, whatever property you are using to rotate one piece around the track would be offset by 3.3333% (=1/30) times the layer number. Except that when you go over 100, you’d have to cycle back to 0, thus you need a modulo, that is, the remainder from dividing by 100.

In pseudo code:

(position + 3.33333 * layer index) % 100

“position” here refers to whatever property value it is that you use for rotating around the track, which I don’t remember off the top of my head. It would correlate to the expression you are using to rotate the rollers themselves; it is some fraction thereof.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

https://planetphotoshop.com/instant-selection-from-any-path.html

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You’ve posted three threads with the same question. One would be enough.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

For the rotating bulldozer tracks I would think you’d animate one triangle along a path, offset the timing with and expressions using layer index (index*full circle/30) and then duplicate the layer 29 times. Also, there needs to be a modulo to put the triangle back at the beginning of the path when it reaches the end. I’d check for “animating an object along a path” to get started.

Arm movement like this is probably best done with a simple rotation animation. (I was about to suggest DUIK tools for inverse kinematics but a mechanical arm will likely look more correct with mechanical rotations rather than IK.)

Sand movement is pretty tricky. I’d just cut the sand into the shapes that you will expect to lift or move and animate those by hand as the scoop hits them. Sand (especially if it is somewhat wet) forms clumps.

You could add a particle effect to simulate individual grains rolling off the contact point, i.e. you can connect a particle emitter to a null and a slider, the null controlling the position and the slider the amount of particles emitted. Then you can animate that effect on and off as needed.