Kalleheikki Kannisto
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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The only plugin that I know which can do this from within AE is Stardust. You can use a 3D object as a container. I couldn’t find any examples of this, but I did this quick test and it does work. This is a very simple car model build from two boxes and four cylinders, unified with a boolean operation into a single container object. Particles are emitted from the center here, with trails traced with aux particles. Additional turbulent displacement used to bounce the particles around. Bounced particles stay within the container object. A more sensible arrangement of origin point and displacement would make for a nicer result, but based on this it looks like it can be achieved this way.
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
Here’s the psd file, in case you’re interested in seeing the result in layered form. You can see how radical the curves adjustment I made is.
13005_dreamcatchercakecutout.psd.zip
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
This is a quick test cut-out with the quick mask tool, plus curves to make the cake look more natural on a white background.
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
The quick selection tool is perfect for this. You just drag in the white areas around the cake then alt-drag in any areas that get selected inside the cake that shouldn’t. Very fast and intuitive.
Selecting the background is easier than selecting the cake. You just invert the selection when done.
Selection refinement: The softness comes from using much too large a radius for the refine edge settings. You don’t need to refine it with a large radius, just a couple of pixels will be enough. You can smooth and feather the selection by a couple of pixels and then add contrast, that should take care of the refinement.
I always use a layer mask to cut the background out, never delete or fill the image layer itself. That way you can always come back to do final touches as the edits are non-destructive.
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
SourceText really just hold the string of characters without any formatting. You can’t access any of the character properties with expressions, you’ll have to settle with what is possible via text animators and expression selector. Character palette items like font, tracking, kerning, etc. are not accessible, neither are paragraph palette items like alignment. You can simulate some of these things with text animators, but it’s a bit limited, and somewhat complicated.
In other words, sourceText is used for string operations, such as counting characters, splitting, concatenating and changing the text content itself.
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
That would be better achieved in After Effects. You can use a smooth fractal noise as a matte, animating the levels or threshold so it goes from black to white through a ripple-like effect. Then you could use the same noise for displacement mapping or use turbulent displacement to give it some water-like warping.
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
Possibly here. They do cost (very reasonably priced) if you intend to use for commercial purposes.
https://openvectormaps.com/Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
If you add the values then in the end it goes from 100 to 200, not 100 to 0.
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
Trapcode Soundkeys has an accumulating option for the output. It is essentially the same result as Dan’s frame-by-frame method, if you convert the expression output to keyframes afterwards. I would recommend converting the expression to keyframes, otherwise you’ll have to calculate the output every time you try to render the video. What I do, to keep the editable expression, is make a copy of the layer and hide it, then convert the copy, so that I can go back to the expressions if need be.
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
Is this a still image? If so, you can separate the people onto a different layer in Photoshop and content-sensitive fill and clone in the missing pieces of the background.
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer
