[Steve Bentley]

The trick with these “transformation” effects is that the butterflies have to fill up the head entirely AND the shapes of the butterflies alone must define the edge of the head before they take flight. (otherwise you end up with a dissolve at some point, which can work but its not as effective as the head entirely made of butterflies).

Hand animating some of the butterflies works the best (and some can be a particle system).
Make sure one or two of the cluster elements is a set of butterflies oriented so that their edges define the shape of the head. That’s going to be a little hard to do over the dome of the head (the wing points can make the nose and the wing edges will make the straight neck). But you can alter the butterfly shape of a few key butterflies so they start with rounded shapes (to make the head) and then animate to become their regular shapes as they fly off.

Its better to have way more than just enough butterflies to cover the head – once they start to fly off you loose the shape of the head pretty fast so if some of the inner ones (that don’t define the shape of the head) can get going and leave the head first, you get to see the shape it was and the shapes its going to end up being at the same time and it becomes an animated Escher.
Doing this all with a particle system is doable but hand animating a good number will give you the exact look you want. Particles are harder to wrangle individually.

[Steve Bentley]

If you want, you can create something EXACTLY along those lines. That’s an Envato template file. These AE generic projects are set up so that the look is established and all the animation is pretty much done for you. The only thing you have to do is substitute images and text to customize the composition for your specific need. There are lots of these types of templates on all sorts of sites. Not only do you get to do the project with minimal anguish but you get to learn how someone in the know has put the whole thing together.
A little bit of knowledge of AE lets you get the job done with these types of files, but with even more knowledge of AE and a desire to look under the hood it’s a great way to expand your knowledge of AE techniques. Even for seasoned pros you can get stuck in a rut with how things get done and looking at other people’s creation files can spark new methods of working with footage.

[Steve Bentley]

You are probably seeing one pixel of the texture being mapped to the polygon.
It might also be that the polyon is only one sided, and with the spherical camera you are looking at the “wrong” side.
Does it render correctly if you use a standard camera?
I didn’t understand the “bake” comment. What is it that needs baking?
Also try selecting the texture tag and right clicking and choose fit to object. It may be the texture is just too massive as it maps now.

[Steve Bentley]

We tried this a while ago and ended up with Ubertracer2. I thought we might be able to “order” the list of objects using expresso by doing what amounts to a bubble sort based on distance tests for each object to every other object.
It got messy fast.
Ubertracer2 has so many controls for distance and nearest neighbor and what kind of linkage you want (even links between two separate groups) it really is taking something complex and making it simple. Well worth the $50 I think.
The Parallax effect for AE is similar (at 6 times the price) but I find the Ubertracer2 has better control.

[Steve Bentley]

That might just work as a key. The board is a decently different color than the rest. Its not going to be perfect because in the old video systems an overly bright shape would produce a dark outline around the shape (see the dark outline around his very white shirt) and that’s going to be a bit noisy. But perhaps with a blur or two and a bit of roto you can get there with minimal pain.
You might also be able to crush the footage little in a separate layer and use his gray hair to step on the chalkboard (and your text) with a screen or lighter color function and no key. You would still need a garbage matte for this or perhaps a really crushed key, but if this depicts the general look of the video, its not that bad at all.
There are always great ways of keying a subject over his own background – its way more forgiving than say a green screen shot.

[Steve Bentley]

Its the “add”, “subtract”, “intersect” etc. functions that are missing. They are kind of transfer/blend modes but because they are used on masks they are closer in function to a boolean.

[Steve Bentley]

Yes, check mark is there in the closed category of the mask/shape menu (and BTW, we still don’t have access to this in the right click menu after all these years?)
I also knew being closed wasn’t the issue because when I started again I just double clicked the mask icon to auto generate a closed square the size of the layer. Still no boolean on the first mask.
This seems to file specific and layer specific as its not happening with new layers or that same AI file reimported, and I’ve never run into this in all my years (going back to COSA) of doing this, so I’ll bet its an import clash with an older format.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Walter,
Here’s a snippet of the masks opened up below the layer. I was kinda shocked that I hadn’t run into this yet but I think I see why now. This project was sent by a client for modification and was originally done in AE2016. So perhaps its an import error.
Both masks are closed shapes.
If I delete the masks and start again, still no boolean function for the first mask on that specific layer. If I swap the order of the masks the lack of boolean travels with the mask. If I swap the masks order and add a third, the second mask still has no boolean. But if I make a new layer, all is normal.
The layer is an outlined illustrator file set to continuously rasterize.
If I reimport that file as a new layer – all is normal.
So at this point no solve required, but one more oddity to add to the AE2018 growing list.

[Steve Bentley]

No worries, I get a lot of those “reported posts” for some reason. I’m on a first name basis with the Cow moderators because of it.

Glass eh? You really are testing your green screen chops. But yes, glass is keyable and your background will show through. But its trickier than most foreground subjects. The key needs to be excellent and therefor the techniques used in the shoot need to be good too.

Green/blue screen is a personal preference thing based on what works and what has worked for each artist in the past. So you will get as many different views on the best way to approach it as there are VFX films in the Hollywood cannon. But here’s my two cents for the best keys.

First, the reason we use green screen is that it’s A) very different from skin tones and B) is the second least noisy record of the three RGB channels in an image (more so in film but this is still true for video/HD/4K). So for glass, green would be a better choice over blue (the noisiest record by a long shot). If you don’t need to have your hand in there Red screen (red is the least noisy of the three channels) would be the best choice.

We also don’t use the lights that are on the talent to light the screen. These talent lights tend to be of the yellow variety, or worse, gelled to get some effect or drama. Instead we use a separate bank of lights (in our case KinoFlo’s) with green gels or green bulbs in them so that the only light (for the most part) that is hitting the green screen is, well, green. Any other color of light will contaminate the green color and reduce what you can do with the keyer. (remember white light is made of all colors so even that has some “anti” green components in it). This isn’t always feasible (like outdoors with hundreds of yards of green screen billowing in the wind) But it can make a difference with a hard key like glass or smoke.

Even lighting across the screen is also important. If you have a hot spot in the middle of your screen that will be seen by the keyer as a separate color from the dim outer edge and you will have to pull separate keys for both areas or crush one key farther than would be ideal to accommodate both ranges of color in the one key. Use a spot meter to lens the screen and see where the hots spots are. This goes double for wrinkles. Either use a painted flat or stretch the screen fabric on a frame. Wrinkles cause shadows and with shadows you get another color of green to contend with.

Foreground colors to avoid: For Green screen – yellow and of course green. For Blue screen – Pink and of course blue ( a lighter blue is usually ok). These colors will not key properly on their respective screen colors. (pink is made of red and blue light and yellow is made of green and red light so there is a lot of the screen color hiding in these two bad colors)

Keep the talent/props away from the screen. A good rule of thumb for a minimum distance is the width of the green screen. We tend to use 20×20′ screens as a minimum so we always make sure the talent is at least 20′ in front of the screen. This also helps with keeping the shooting lights on the talent and off the screen and keeping the green lights on the screen and off the talent. But remember as you push that screen into the distance it will get smaller to the camera and cover less and less of the talent.

You want a rich green color. I prefer something in the 66FF00 range (hex) while others prefer something in the 00CC00 range. Saturation is the most important because today’s keyers, while tuned for Blue and Green screen, can really key any color. There are some standards when you buy green screen paint and green screen fabric and tape and they all tend to be in the same family. But they will vary depending on where you are in the world and who is the biggest user/vendor in your area. You can also rent “proper” green screens with stretch frames.

There are a lot of myths out there for this type of effects work, spawned, unfortunately, by the bane of our existence, the “behind the scenes” featurettes on DVD’s these days. They make it look like its a one button operation. It can be if every thing is just right, but that rarely happens. Watch the behind the scenes for Lord of the Rings. Almost every shot had rotoscoping in it – even with giant green screens. That’s probably as close to the tedious reality as those featurettes get.

Don’t be afraid of the green screen reflecting/refracting off/in the glass. You can use this element to inject what the glass would have been reflecting if shot in the environment that you are compositing it over.

Don’t be afraid to mask of parts of your shot that are giving you bad keys and key them separately (in another layer) with different settings or a different technique. Don’t be afraid if highlights or shadows don’t come out clean in the key – you can add them as another layer with (for highlights) a screen or lighter color blend function or (for shadows) multiply or darker color blend function, without any color keying at all. FYI and in reference to your first post – shadows on a green screen will not key away, we use them to put shadows from the talent into the background scene. If you are having to crush the key to get rid of a shadow it means the edge of the key on the talent will suffer.

Many keys are not just one effect – adding in things like the matte choker and de-chatter effect or adding another layer with the exact same key and using it to clip the original’s key matte just a smidge can give you that little bit extra. The edge of hair can be separate element so you don’t get helmet head and you can rotoscope in a face so that the face itself is not keyed at all.

Work with as uncompressed footage as you can. Any lossy compression will add noise and remove color or information.
Work with the highest color space you can. 8 Bit can work but you can crush mattes and levels far better with 16 bit and 32 bit footage and it also means there are more divisions of the screen color to play with. (use a 16 or 32 bit comp in AE regardless of footage depth)

Try and shoot your footage at the size you need it in the comp. Blowing something up or scaling it down changes the grain structure of the footage and it won’t match the background footage grain structure. It also softens the image (again not matching the sharp background) – a circle scaled waaay down becomes a square when its made of pixels.

Every body blurs their backgrounds too much thinking that it should be way out of focus. Reference footage shot on the day can get this right, but a rule of thumb we use here when we don’t have that reference is to do what you think is right and then cut the blur in half. A real lens keeps things behind the subject in focus farther than objects in front. And use a camera blur or an after market camera blur like Frischluft to get the kind of bokeh and edge effects a real lens would impart. The eye knows a Gaussian blur or a box blur is not the same as out-of-focus.

Don’t try and color correct your green screen before you key. The color you photographed will be pure whatever it is and have the widest latitude. As soon as you try and change the color or the brightness you start clipping information out and your key will suffer.

Color correct everything after the key.

Finally, rethink your shot – we have so many producers come in wanting to shoot green screen because…. well they don’t really have a good reason. It’s often better to do either as an in-camera effect or shoot it on black or white or shoot it in the real environment or a faked real environment.

[Steve Bentley]

That last sentence of yours sounds very doable – if the head element is in a precomp and that precomp is used by every composition, then changing that one head will ripple through all the comps.
For all the comps you can set up a single preset that will populate the render settings so you can just hit cntrl M in each comp and that will populate the render cue with everything already filled in.

I’ll bet there is a script for multi comp renders but the issue is that not every comp will need to be rendered (the precomp of the head for instance) and you have to choose a name of the file and a destination (ok you don’t have to because it will render to the last place you did). The script would have to be shown the comps that will need to be rendered everytime.