[Phil Williams]

Ah right, so it’s actually a replicator rather than a particle emitter. Thanks for the link (and to Mark for the actual example).

[Phil Williams]

This seems to be a longstanding bug, I’ve had it happen in both Motion 3 and 4, but with me it tends to happen more with text I’ve typed within Motion – every so often, a single letter in a line of text will hop slightly in the Y axis, just for one frame.

Sometimes re-rendering it will fix it, sometimes it won’t. In the latter cases, changing the font, rendering, then changing the font back to the one you really want seems to be a workaround.

[Phil Williams]

I can’t help you with the answer to your question, but I do have one of my own: what’s the technique you’ve used to get particles to land in a specific configuration that builds up to form the logo?

[Phil Williams]

[Mads Meskalin] “Is After Effects more suited to artistic work?”

Well, first define what you mean by “artistic work”. But the bottom line is that about 95% of what you can do in AE, you can also do in Motion – things like the Puppet Tool being among the exceptions. Motion does some things much better than AE, AE does some things much better than Motion. But most of the time, you can do what you need to do in either app, which is great if you don’t have the time or money to invest in buying and learning both.

It would be great if Motion did everything AE did, but AE has been around for 17 years, Motion only for 6 years. It’s pretty impressive that Motion has come as far as it has in such a short space of time, even if it is still pretty buggy and idiosyncratic 🙂

AE is as widely used in commercial work as Motion is, if not more so. But if you’re seeing more “artistic work” on AE reels than Motion reels, it’s not because Motion can’t do it. Arguably, things like the Replicator (which I don’t think AE has an equivalent to), allied with paint strokes, particle effects and behaviours, mean that Motion is ideally suited to creating artistic effects if you’re so inclined.

I’d highly recommend Patrick Sheffield’s book How To Cheat In Motion. There are some *very* artistic uses of Motion in there.

[Phil Williams]

[Noah Kadner] “I see no reason why anyone would restrict themselves to one over the other”

Not everyone has the time to learn both, not everyone has the money to buy both. And there are probably plenty of AE users who don’t have Macs 😉

[Phil Williams]

[Andy Neil] “The easiest solution is to draw the mask as a shape using Motion’s shape tool”

This is my issue, though… I’m often dealing with extremely complex images created in other applications, which you’d sooner slit your wrists than try and manually draw a mask or shape around. What’s even more annoying is that these images typically have their own alpha channel, but there appears to be no way to use that to generate an outline.

I guess the frustration comes from a background working with vision mixers and DVEs in a linear tape suite, where you could easily generate an outline around any image that had a key signal/alpha channel. And as I say, if Motion can generate a drop shadow around any object, then it shouldn’t be difficult from a coding perspective to generate an outline too. I guess it’s something they just didn’t think to do for anything other than text or shapes created inside Motion.

[Phil Williams]

[Noah Kadner] ” it sounds like you would want to draw your own masks for that sort of effect”

If so, that’s one of the infuriating aspects of Motion – it offers some fantastic tools for simplifying complex tasks, but then forces you to employ incredibly time-consuming ways of achieving what should be extremely simple tasks.

After all, thinking logically, if Motion can generate a drop shadow for any object (not just text or shapes), it should be able to generate an outline for any object too.

[Phil Williams]

Sorry I wasn’t clear. I was asking if there’s a straightforward way of achieving a variable-thickness outline on *any* object I import – as far as I can see, only shapes and text objects generated within Motion have a specific “outline” functionality in the Inspector. It’s obviously possible to apply drop shadows to other objects, but a drop shadow is something distinctly different from an outline.

Drawing masks is not really an option, because I would like the ability to create outlines for complex images (such as things created in Illustrator or Photoshop) that would take a painfully long time to mask accurately.

I’ve tried applying the Outer Glow filter, but that’s not really what I need. A plugin that was able to generate an adjustable outline using an image’s alpha channel, and preferably with a choice of Colour, Gradient or Texture (as with the text and shape outline controls) would be perfect.

EDIT – let me put it another way. Say I draw an irregularly-shaped mask and apply it to some video, but then I want that mask to have a visible coloured outline (let’s say yellow) – how do I do that? Do I have to duplicate the mask, apply it to a yellow solid, place that solid behind the masked video, then resize the solid so that it becomes visible around the edges of the first mask? Or is there a more efficient way?

[Phil Williams]

There is no dedicated cube-making tool in Motion. The way you’ve done it is the only way to do it.

[Phil Williams]

It’s certainly possible to recreate all the animation, but personally I wouldn’t try redrawing the logo in Motion (if that’s what you meant). It’s probably do-able with patience, but I’d want to get someone who knows what they’re doing to draw it Adobe Illustrator.