Styles in Motion: Neon Text
This project will familiarize you with different layer style options and animating a sequence in ImageReady by only making changes to the layer style settings. Creating neon effects involves two elements the tubing and the light glow. When the light is off, the tubing still has a 3-D surface and casts a shadow if any ambient light is present. When the light is on, it casts a glow but no shadows. Note Intermediate or advanced Photoshop users may want to open the file NeonText.psd on the DVD and...
Transferring Layers with Style Effects
After Effects doesn't utilize layer styles the way Photoshop does, so it's important to know how to transfer layers and keep the applied effects in place. In most cases, merely merging the layer with the style effect applied to a new blank layer will do the trick. Although they are not editable in After Effects, there are only four layer styles that will transfer correctly visually Drop Shadow, Bevel And Emboss, Color Overlay, and Inner Shadow Figure 2.4 . When the layers are transferred to...
Green Screen Materials
Several types of screen materials, from cloth to special paint and assorted papers, are available. If you need portability, a cloth screen on a stand might meet your needs. This lt will give you the flexibility to position the background anywhere that's convenient, and u many pro lighting equipment and supply houses will rent them to you by the day. With a little research online at regional supplier sites, or on eBay, you'll be able to find backdrop starter kits complete with stands and lights....
Gravity: The Freefall
A study in gravity is more than just dropping objects off the Tower of Pisa. In animation, it involves several other factors that include velocity and wind drag but ultimately, all objects in the natural world will find their way down. Falling objects need smooth motion. Don't use a sharp turn unless there's a clear reason for it, such as an outside force that changes the object's direction. A smartly placed blur will help sell the motion. The first project we'll create in our study of gravity...
Inertia and Friction: What a Drag!
Simulating friction and drag in an animation is all about the timing. Think about some simple practical situations you may encounter in everyday life, such as rolling a chair across different floor surfaces or the difference between running on land and running in a swimming pool. Not only does friction increase the force needed for movement, it also slows down the speed at which the motion is made. This project is a simple exercise in creating motion drag a principle that can be easily applied...
Removing Chroma Spill from Details
When you have a chroma key shot that has a lot of background color bleed or spill into the details and edges of the subject, the shot will require a bit more than just the simple click to remove it. Keylight can remove spill from fine hair or separate reflections from glass with only a few adjustments. In this first example, the figure was lit very lightly against a dark blue-screen background, which was composited against a scenic background Figure 9.2 . The problem was that her fine, wavy...
Basic 3-D Layers in Motion
Setting up a basic 3-D animation in After Effects requires having some basic knowledge of multiple views, moving layers in three-dimensional space, and using the X-, Y-, and Z-axes. It's really much easier than it sounds, and this project will introduce you to some of those basic controls. You may want to follow along with the completed After Effects file, 3-DText.aep, on the DVD. 1. Start a new project file in After Effects and import two single-layer Photoshop files, FilmReel.psd and...
Kinematics: Human Figure Character Animation
Kinematics, in computer graphics language, is motion created by the force of another material body in motion usually something that's attached, as a hand is to an arm. If the arm is moved, then the hand must go with it, even though the hand is still free to move on its own. This is something usually practiced by 3-D character modelers who create video games and animated motion pictures. Fortunately, After Effects gives us some pretty powerful tools to accomplish kinematic motion on...
Using Ultimatte in a Production Composition
Let's look at the blue screen that we cleaned up with a garbage matte and rotoscoping in Chapter 6, Blue-Screen Garbage Mattes. This footage is going to be composited over a motion matte painting which is created in Chapter 12, Making Movies from Stills . The blue-screen footage has been scaled down to the appropriate size for this composition and positioned where the actors will walk across the catwalk in the scene Figure 9.14 . I applied the Ultimatte AdvantEdge plug-in to the foreground...
The Classic Sudden Stop
What's the visual difference between a normal stop and a classic stop of an object In the natural world, something with mass that's moving rapidly either rolls to a stop or needs a great deal of friction to bring it to a complete stop. If it's a solid object, a car for instance, it will most likely roll or skid to a stop. The only effect that inertia will have on it will be transferred through the tires, wheels, and suspension and to the body, which may move up and forward slightly and then...
Creating a Displacement Map
The After Effects Displacement Map Effect plug-in uses varying levels of gray in the map image. Lighter areas of the image will move the image up and to the right, while the darker areas will move portions of the image down and to the left. How much it gets moved is controlled not only by the effect settings in After Effects but also by how much contrast is in the displacement map source image. To create the displacement map for this project, we'll start with a new image file in Photoshop that...
Stabilizing and Rotoscoping Old Movies
Before they are digitized, many old movies require a lot of restoration work because of deteriorating film and the crude photographic equipment that was used in the early twentieth century. During film exposure, early moviemakers used hand-cranked cameras with loose mechanisms. This loose quality was usually compounded by equally crude-fitting projection equipment, making for a pretty jumpy viewing experience. Restoration of old movie footage requires many techniques, depending on the amount of...
Blue-Screen Matte Rotoscoping
As we covered the process of making garbage mattes in Chapter 6, Blue-Screen Garbage Mattes, several frames required rotoscoping where the actors walked off the edge of the blue-screen tarp. From the After Effects file, we rendered out two QuickTime movies a pre and post. Those edited-out movies contain about 1 second of video that needs to be roto edited. 1. Open the movie file, BSMattePre.mov, in ImageReady and jump to Photoshop. Start with the first layer Frame 1 , and use the Paintbrush...
Applying a Displacement Map
Follow these steps to apply the map to an image 1. Create a new project in After Effects and make a new composition, selecting the preset, NTSC DV, 720 x 480, and 5 seconds in length. 2. Import the file Water.jpg from the DVD and the Cloud map image you just created or use the provided map image, CloudsBlur720.jpg on the DVD . Center the Cloud map image in the Comp 1 window by dragging it from the Project window to the Timeline Figure 2.12 . Figure 2.12 Create a new project and import the...
Preparing Frames for Rotoscoping
To do frame-by-frame rotoscoping in Photoshop, you need to convert the movie to separate editable frames. By opening the movie in ImageReady, single layers and frames will be automatically created from the QuickTime movie footage. In ImageReady, open the QuickTime movie clip you rendered out of After Effects File gt Open . You'll see a dialog box asking you to select some options Figure 6.9 . In this case, because we rendered only the portion we need to rotoscope, we'll select the From...
The Static Garbage Matte: Defining the Matte's Boundaries
Defining precisely where the boundaries of the garbage matte need to be placed depends on the extreme motion path of your actors in the frame. You will need to define the beginning and end of their path, as well as how far outside of a straight line in that path that they venture including any extremities or props used in the scene. Note The work in this chapter requires the upgrade to QuickTime Pro, not QuickTime Player. Pro is available from Apple for less than 30. 1. For this project, we'll...
Cause and Effect
The effects of gravity, recoil, drag, friction, inertia, and collision are around us every day. We'll explore some common principles applied to animation that will give the viewer a sense of realistic motion. This is all part of telling the story of what your characters or moving objects are supposed to be doing. To help you better understand these principles and apply them to your own animations, the projects in this chapter will include realistic effects, timing, and more. Gravity and...
Pre-Animation: Painless Tweening in ImageReady
Tweening is the process of automatically adding frames between two selected frames called key frames to create a designated number of steps of motion, opacity, or applied effects so that you can create a smooth, continuous animation sequence. The more key frames you have, the more control you will have over your animation's tweening. Knowing what the final animation will be used for will help you to determine the speed and length of the animation sequence you are creating. Using more frames for...
Exporting Animation Files from ImageReady
There are two basic ways to save your animations out of ImageReady as QuickTime movies or as animated GIF files. Of course, it helps to know going into your project what kind of animation you're creating the frames per second, pixel dimensions, color depth, etc. Exporting the animations requires testing and previewing to get the timing correct. You can do this quickly by selecting the default web browser although the color depth will be limited to an optimized 256-color palette, you will still...
The Garbage Matte in Motion
Sometimes the static garbage matte is sufficient to cover up the bulk of unwanted material, leaving only a small portion of the footage to be retouched. In this example, sections of the footage where the actors are off the edge of the blue screen are at both the beginning and the end of the motion path. We will add some solid blocks of color that can be moved to fill in the largest gaps, so only the first and last few frames will need to be rotoscoped. 1. Add a solid layer Layer gt New gt...