Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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If you turn off the Additive Blend in the Cell Controls you’ll get a less hot result – and you can then of course play with the Color Over Life gradient to get the colors that suit you.
But it’s the Additive blend that’s making it “burn out” as it were!
You may however just want to play with the brightness of the middle color of the gradient to see if that helps first.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Andy Neil] “A good feature request would be button to have Motion clean up points automatically, leaving you with just some tweaking adjustments. Sort of like the reduce keyframes feature.”
Agreed.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Chris Lehmann] “I’ve been using the Motion paint function extensively for the past few weeks and it can be incredibly powerful. Just one thing to look out for is if you are using A LOT of paint objects in one project, the file size will balloon to several hundred megs. I looked at the XML in the .motn file and it’s storing X/Y coordinates for thousands of vertices up to the 10th decimal point! For me this caused major slowdowns when working, and 2-4 second freezes during auto-saves. “
Make sure you check the smoothing checkbox in the Painstroke HUD before you start making loads of complex shapes. Without this turned on you will get an insane number of points, whereas if you enable smoothing you will get a bezier shape with massively fewer points.
You can see the difference from this example:
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
The way I generally like to do this is this:
Start with a good metallic look for your logo (or text) layer – a gradient fill is the easiest way of getting this.
Clone the “logo” (or text) layer.
Apply a Levels filter to it to brighten it up to “shine” level.
Make a thin rectangular mask to cover your logo to whatever width you want for your “shine” – I like to rotate this so the shine is angled rather than straight.
Apply this mask to your brightened Clone layer.
Then animate the X position of the mask so the shine moves across the logo.
You can also add other effects to the cloned layer such as Glow and Dazzle – you can also colorize it if that works for you. You might want to add a Levels filter to your base layer and darken it down it a bit to help the shine stand out.
You can also create additional masks for the same layer to add subsidiary light passes or to make the first one more interesting.
This technique gives you a lot of flexibility.
Hope that helps.
EDIT: I’m not generally a huge fan of the Extrude filter but a very small, subtle amount (i.e. minimal distance value) really helps if you’re going for a metallic look.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Mark Spencer] “Very rare is it that I have something to offer beyond what you usually suggest Simon 🙂
Be aware, Chris, that this behavior is pretty demanding on your system, especially if you have a lot of points.”Thanks, Mark – certainly not true at all but very nice of you to say so 😉
Incidentally, I am getting very smooth real-time playback with your wriggle shape suggestion – maybe my line doesn’t have that many points but it does seem to work very nicely as an overall effect.
Anyway, this is a good effect that I’ve just added to my library so thanks for the inspiration.
EDIT: Just to correct my previous recommendation to Chris, if you want more complexity you don’t have to make a second replicator just add a new line or lines to the first replicator which is a much more efficient way of doing it.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Mark Spencer] “You can and the Wriggle Shape behavior to a shape to make it move like the scribble effect.”
Of course! How could I forget that? Amazingly useful behavior as are the other shape behaviors Oscillate and Randomise. Much better than what I suggested.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Actually there’s a pretty easy way to do this and get a good result.
Paint a single rough line as the base of your “scribble” – a nice rough angled stroke works well. Set the width to what you want.
Add a replicator to the “scribble” line. Set the Shape to Image and the Arrangement to Tile Fill.
Add the shape you are trying to fill to the Image well – I used text but you can use anything that has an alpha channel to define the overall shape.
Set the number of Columns and Rows to be sufficient to fill your shape the way you want it.
Increase the Scale Randomness to get a more varied look.
To get an animated scribble you can for example apply a Randomise Behavior to the X Scale and adjust the Speed and Noisiness to taste.
You may want to add a second version of this replicator using a different source “scribble” to get a bit more randomness but that should give you the basics to experiment with.
Here’s my very quick test:
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
There’s no equivalent to the Ae Scribble Effect but this would be pretty easy to achieve by hand using the Paint tool – more time-consuming and less automated but it would still work.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Tom Fox] “These links now, unfortunately, seem to be defunct.”
What are you trying to do?
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Click on the Paint Brush tool and scribble away? Motion’s paint capabilities are stunningly good.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com
