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[travist] “how is Curious Worldmaps more abstract? I was under the impression that they pulled satellite images on the fly – so that program would almost be a perfect solution for this problem, although a cost prohibitive one -“

No, for the most part not. It is fully database-based, meaning that each part of it is defined as a separate tile/ element that is assembled on the fly, e.g a tile contains all the roads on one layer, the height info on another, borders on another etc.. Based on the rules you define for the coloring and look, it will then be assembled as needed. The parts themselves are elaborately prepared very much like e.g. the USGS prepares it’s data, meaning that most surface points primarily exist as an abstract coordinate point with associated info. It is possible to overlay satellite imagery, though, but usually it looks better without it as the sattellite photos often have a lower resolution then the database. I didn’t mean that you need to get a license of the product yourself, but if you are living in an area with a halfway large city and associated TV station, there is a good chance you can find a service facility associated with the TV station that have one and you could ask them to create a fly-in for you… It would definitely be cheaper than the days you would spend yourself on trying to bring together other stuff from different sources.

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Specular highlights are supposed to be used with blendmodes (like most other shading passes) and thus have no Alpha. you can however easily create one by unmultiplying based on the brightness. In After Effects this can be done with a series of plugins. Search the AE forum (or the respective other forums, if you use Fusion ofr combustion*).

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You know that you are commiting a criminal act by infringing their conditions for use, do you? That aside, most likely you simply need a few good aerial shots to work with in the finer zoom levels (along with properly licensed satellite imagery for the farther out parts) and those don’t come for free. Other than that there’s no general recipe. You will definitely have to make some corrective warping/ morphing part of your plan to line up items from different resolutions. Because of the polar distortion of the images along with lens distortion you will always experience jumps and “swimming” of one or the other item. The only tool that would be able to do this in an acceptable manner is of course RE:Flex and it’s not cheap as is the imagery. So unless our client is really willing to pay a lot of money, I’d try to convince him that all this is a bad idea. An alternative would be to approach this on a more abstract level and make use of tools such as Courious Worldmaps.

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Animate the source text paramter. You need a slight detour to do this.

a) Create a text layer.
b) Set all your parameters and assign the mask path.
c) Apply an Effects —> Expression Controls —> Slider
d) Alt+click the stopwatch for the source text property
e) Apply this simple expression:

Math.round(thisLayer.effect(“Slider”)(“Slider”))

Animate the slider to change the value fior the text.

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[bonerton] “1) i couldn’t find any material options that added a simple outline so i used sketch and toon, but once applied, it changed all my original materials’ colors and overrode the one material’s alpha. so, how could i achieve a flat graphic look with outlines and alpha channels without having S&T override the alpha and original color?”

Use separate materials for the fills and check your render settings. Turn off the option that makes S&T affect the background and your Alpha will remain intact. Same for the quantization – simply turn it off globally if you don’t need it or use the S&T render tag to control the behavior on a per-object basis.

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You could link it with XPresso, but it may yield incorrect results and complicates texturing. Refer to my MoGraph tutorial series to learn a clean and safe way how to create a VU-meter.

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[KirAsh4] “Any suggestions other than ‘go shoot it again’?”

Well, rotoscoping would be even more painful, so reshooting may not be that bad an idea.

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Isolate the values

sound_ref=thisComp.layer(“Sound”).effect(“Both Channels”)(“Slider”); //layer reference
sound_amp = 100; //multiplier to intensify movement

X=position[0];
Y=position[1]+sound_ref*sound_amp;

[X,Y]

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Use wipes to draw segments or create contours by copy&pasting masks/ paths from illustrator or Photoshop and the stroking them with the Stroke effect.

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Either use the Extract RPF camera keyframe assistant or import a *.ma file directly. The scene file must not contain anything else than a single camera or it won’t work correctly.

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