[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Polar coordinates is the easy way, but may not be how you want this to look.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

The circle-to-straight-line transformation is the smaller of the issues. Would need to know how you envision the transformation of what’s inside the globe to what’s on the ground will look like. You should graph that out as a (projection of a) grid to figure out what type of transformation you need in between. A globe can be mapped in a variety of ways, and so can a plane. A grid representation of how the latitudes and longitudes will look before and after is a critical missing step here.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Yes, you just need a tiny amount of overlap to get rid of the problem. Even half a pixel would likely take care of it. You can adjust the track matte by simple choker or offset the shape ever so slightly.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You can set AE (in general preferences) to use the system color picker, where you can create custom colors.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If I understand your construction correctly, it would be like this for the caption position:

title = thisComp.layer("Rectangle").sourceRectAtTime();
padding = effect("Padding")("Slider");
value + [title.width + padding, 0]

In order for this to work, the caption layer paragraph needs to be right aligned (with the anchor point at the right edge) and it needs to be aligned to the right edge of the Title layer to begin with. This only changes the relative position based on the text width, so it needs to be correctly placed at the start.

Not tested, but theoretically should work.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I’d guess it would be like this:
L1 = TextPart01.length;
L2 = TextPart02.length;
L = L1+L2;
startPos = 100/L*L1

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

To get rid of this behavior and keep your smooth edges, you just need to change the strategy so that the edges do not coincide. Instead of having two edges exactly in the same place. In your example, you would be better off drawing a red rectangle (without the triangular notch in it) then a yellow triangle on top of it. Or you could just expand the lower shape by one pixel, if you don’t want to rebuild.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

There’s no such trigger event as “color hits mask”. There are layer emitters, which are used in the first example (meaning the one in the earlier, linked thread) and light emitters that are used in the one described here.

A couple of things of note:
The keys and the piano roll are not aligned in your screenshot. Neither are the lights and the keys, at least not that accurately. There seems to be a lighting effect already in place in the original footage when the keys are played. All thse things throw off the triggering.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

There’s not nearly enough information here to understand what you’re trying to do and with what type of footage.

– Is this a video that has been shot with a camera, or a 3D animation?

– What happens to the item that is being taken out of the box in the original footage? Do you need to remove it? Or have you added it in After Effects to begin with?

– How do you get something to the top of an open box? Or isn’t it open at the top?

– What are you masking off? Why?

No idea what you’re looking at. A minimum would be showing the scene you have, telling us how you are doing it and explaining what you want to have as the end result.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

As you can see in the image, the pixels are not only 0 or 255, due to antialiasing, the effort of the software to smooth the edges visually. While you can read the values as 255 or 0 based on whether they are inside or outside the resolution-independent VECTOR mask, once you get to the comp pixel resolution BITMAPPED representation, it will be a blend between the two anywhere parts of the pixel are inside and parts of the pixel are outside the vector area. Thus you’re really getting in-between values like 52, 89, 167, 214 etc. that get blended together to create a bitmap image for the screen. So in reality, AE is blending transparent pixels at such edges.

There’s a “layer image quality” switch in the timeline (the switch with a diagonal line). If you turn that to “draft” you get an aliased (no smoothing) output. You can try that on your track matte layers to see how the difference between anti-aliased and aliased looks.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer