[Patrick Collins]

Oh wait.. I see, by using the gradient tool and dragging that over the entire text area, that seems to make it do what I was wanting it to…

-patrick

[Patrick Collins]

Ok, I went and bought path styler pro…

Now I am confused why I can’t get anything to look good.. Everything that path styler pro does ends up looking like pixelated trash in AI…

Plain text:
https://collinatorstudios.com/www/path_styler_1.png

Path styler pro settings:
https://collinatorstudios.com/www/path_styler_2.png

I click ok, and pixelated trash:
https://collinatorstudios.com/www/path_styler_3.png

What am I doing wrong???

-patrick

[Patrick Collins]

Hmmm… I am not feeling like I have the kind of “control” that I am looking for… In photoshop I can easily edit the layer style and tweak and tweak and tweak, where this feels much more permanent and much more difficult to change later… How is something like this normally done? Do artists usually just use something like the pen tool and create lighting shades that way?

-patrick

[Patrick Collins]

Hi,

I am a little confused… How do I have “letter shape” and “circle” in two layers? Am I supposed to duplicate these layers? really?

-patrick

[Patrick Collins]

ah thank you! separate fields off did the trick.

-patrick

[Patrick Collins]

Hi MIchael.

Thank you very much for the help… I think I’ve pretty much got it…

One more question, how is the best way to keep the background from being affected?

My solution was to put a 3rd track of original footage as the top layer, and then make a mask around the tron character and set it to subtract… Just wondered if there is a better way to do this? I tried applying a mask to the layer with the keylight/invert/glow, but it didn’t let the background of the layer beneath it to come through…

-patrick

[Patrick Collins]

Hi,

Well.. I am not sure if I did this as you were suggesting.. But I got a result that is pretty good… Not quite perfect, but it’s getting there.

I have updated my project file:
https://collinatorstudios.com/www/tron_test.zip

I used keylight to remove the blue in the suit, and then placed an image of a blue gradient behind it.. Then I put another layer of the original video with a mask revealing the background (to cover up any parts of my background that were turning blue).

My question is: Did I do this right? I don’t really have any way to add ‘glow’ to this, because it’s a background color showing through the cut outs of the suit.. The best I could do was use keylight’s edge softening to make it look sort of like it’s glowing.

Another question I had is, if you are familiar with Tron, the color in the suits sort of have a lot of variations of shading, and when they move, it’s extremely noticeable. This is the reason why I made my background solid color a gradient image… Though it’s still a little too static feeling.. I am wondering if you have a suggestion for something I can do to give the color a little bit of life?

Here is a still shot of Tron:
https://collinatorstudios.com/www/tron_image.jpg

Thanks.

-patrick

[Patrick Collins]

Hi Michael,

No rush on this… I want to do this right, so I am willing to be as patient as necessary; so if you can point me to some other resources later, that would be cool.

Thanks, and in the meantime I will check out videocopilot.

-patrick

[Patrick Collins]

Thank you for the replies, Bruce and Michael..

I tried your suggestion Bruce, but it doesn’t seem to be working quite right– Maybe I am doing something wrong? It seems like the white of the suit is showing up rather than the blue… And over all too many things in the environment are also glowing (the couch, the lamp, etc).

I have uploaded my project file with a few seconds of video hoping that you can take a look and see if there’s something else you’d to get this set up right.

I was looking into chromakeying, since Michael recommended it, but I am not sure how you do that in After Effects CS3, which is the version I have.

Here is the project and media file:
https://collinatorstudios.com/www/tron_test.zip

Thank you in advance for any additional guidance/help.

-patrick

[Patrick Collins]

How do you add a point to a mask? I was not able to figure this out….

But I did finish my video if anyone is interested in seeing it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6NxH3rWRfs

-patrick

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