IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 | (music playing)
| | 00:06 | Hi! I'm Chris Meyer of Crish Design
and in this After Effects Apprentice Lesson,
| | 00:10 | we want to cover three sets of advanced tools:
| | 00:13 | Paint, Roto Brush, and Puppet.
| | 00:16 | In the first portion of this lesson Trish
will demonstrate After Effects Paint tools.
| | 00:21 | She'll show you how to use the Brush tool
including its options
| | 00:24 | for duration, channels, and modes.
| | 00:26 | The Eraser tool, which also has its own
channels and modes to reveal layers,
| | 00:32 | and the Clone Stamp tool, which makes it
possible to repair problems with
| | 00:35 | or add objects to existing layers.
| | 00:37 | I will then demonstrate the Roto Brush tool,
which helps automate the process
| | 00:41 | of cutting out a foreground
object on the background.
| | 00:44 | I'll start with a simple instant gratification
exercise just so you can
| | 00:47 | get familiar with the tool.
| | 00:48 | Then I'll walk you through a much more difficult
shot showing you the essential workflow
| | 00:52 | of identifying and defining a base frame,
setting the propagation parameters,
| | 00:56 | making corrective strokes overtime,
and refining the final matte
| | 01:02 | so it blends in nicely over your background.
| | 01:03 | Then we'll end by having some fun
in playing with the Puppet tool.
| | 01:07 | I'll show you how to warp and bend
flat still image artwork,
| | 01:11 | how to manage overlapping areas,
how to control the amount of work applied
| | 01:14 | to specific areas of an image, and
how to deal with images that have complex
| | 01:18 | alpha channels with multiple shapes.
| | 01:19 | When you master these three tools,
you're definitely going beyond
| | 01:23 | the basic After Effects user
and becoming a real power user.
| | 01:25 | These tools have uses both for creative purposes
and for visual effects work.
| | 01:30 | So if you're ready, let's dive in
and learn some new tools in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the exercise files| 00:02 | Throughout these After Effects Apprentice
courses, you'll find that Trish and I focus
| | 00:06 | on core concepts of using
and learning After Effects.
| | 00:09 | Not specific tricks that only work
with certain pieces of footage.
| | 00:12 | Therefore, if you don't have any exercise
files, or if you want to use your own footage,
| | 00:16 | you'll still get a lot out of
just watching these videos.
| | 00:19 | That said, studies have shown that the best
way to learn something is to actually do it.
| | 00:24 | Therefore for the optimal learning experience
we suggest you do get access to the exercise files.
| | 00:28 | There are two ways to do that.
| | 00:31 | One is to get a lynda.com premium membership.
| | 00:34 | That will allow you to download the files
for After Effects CS4, CS5, CS5.5 or CS6.
| | 00:41 | These are the same files we're
using when we record these videos.
| | 00:44 | The other approach is to get a copy
of our book After Effects Apprentice.
| | 00:48 | The third edition covers CS5, CS5.5 and CS6.
| | 00:51 | If you're still using After Effects CS4,
then get the second edition of the book.
| | 00:55 | Those files are pretty close to the
ones we use throughout this video course.
| | 00:59 | Whenever there are differences
we'll note them as we teach.
| | 01:02 | Now either way we think it's a good value.
| | 01:04 | If you get the premium membership to lynda,
you could access to exercise files for hundreds
| | 01:08 | of other courses.
| | 01:10 | If you get one of our books, you've got some
additional text explanation for each of the
| | 01:13 | features we discuss and you've got a
desk reference next to you all the time.
| | 01:17 | Now throughout these lessons we're going
to be using a combination of After Effects
| | 01:20 | CS5, CS5.5 and CS6. Don't be thrown off by
any minor differences in the user interface,
| | 01:27 | most of the functionality of After Effects
is identical across all of these versions.
| | 01:32 | If there are differences from version to
version, we'll note it in the little caption that
| | 01:35 | runs along the bottom of the screen.
| | 01:37 | But all that said, we really hope you have a
lot of fun with these courses learning After Effects.
| | 01:42 | It's the application we've been using for
ages now, we have a great time with it, and
| | 01:46 | we hope you get the same
enjoyment out of it that we do.
| | 01:49 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
1. The Brush ToolSetting up| 00:07 |
In this movie, we'll set up the
workspace for using Paint and cover some
| | 00:11 |
important basic concepts.
| | 00:13 |
If you have the Exercise Files, go
ahead and open AEA_Paint and Puppet.
| | 00:19 |
If you are following along with
our second edition of After Effects
| | 00:22 |
Apprentice, this is Lesson #10.
| | 00:23 |
I am going to open the first
composition 01-Paint Basics*starter which includes
| | 00:31 |
one layer of a fanciful mask.
| | 00:34 |
If you don't have the Exercise Files,
just import any image that has an
| | 00:37 |
interesting alpha channel.
| | 00:39 |
When I turn on the Transparency Grid,
you can see this image has an alpha
| | 00:43 |
channel and even the eyes are
transparent and that will be important later on,
| | 00:48 |
when we learn about how to
paint with different channels.
| | 00:51 |
I'll turn off the Transparency Grid and
then double-click the layer to open the
| | 00:56 |
image in the Layer panel.
| | 00:58 |
Whenever you use any of the Paint tools,
you must be in the Layer panel,
| | 01:03 |
not the Composition panel.
| | 01:04 |
I'll set the magnification to Fit up
to 100%, so we can see our entire image.
| | 01:09 |
There are three Paint tools; the Brush tool,
the Clone Stamp tool and the Eraser tool.
| | 01:17 |
Notice if you click any of these tools,
because the Auto-Open panels options is switched on,
| | 01:22 |
two panels automatically
appear on the right hand side,
| | 01:27 |
the Brushes panel and the Paint panel.
| | 01:29 |
These panels have been added to the
Standard Workspace or whatever workspace
| | 01:33 |
you are currently in.
| | 01:35 |
However, instead of using the Standard
Workspace, I'm going to select the Paint Workspace.
| | 01:40 |
Now when I do that, a number of things happen.
| | 01:43 |
Not only do I get the two panels I
need, Paint and Brushes, but it also
| | 01:48 |
rearranges the Composition and Layer panels.
| | 01:51 |
It puts the Composition panel on the
left and the Layer panel on the right.
| | 01:56 |
The only drawback you might find is that you
no longer have easy access to the Project panel.
| | 02:02 |
If you need the Project panel at any
time, select Window>Project or you can use
| | 02:08 |
the shortcut Command+0 on Mac, or Ctrl
+0 on Windows, and that will open the
| | 02:14 |
Project panel on the left-hand side or
if you like, you can go ahead and dock
| | 02:19 |
the Project panel with the Composition panel.
| | 02:21 |
I'll open that a little wider and now I
can toggle between the Composition panel
| | 02:25 |
and the Project panel, really easily.
| | 02:27 |
So again, any painting you need to do,
you need to do it in the Layer panel and
| | 02:32 |
the results will appear both in the
Layer panel and in the Composition panel.
| | 02:37 |
The advantage to having the
Composition panel open is that you will see this
| | 02:41 |
layer in relation to all the other
layers as well as other effects that might be
| | 02:45 |
applied after the Paint effect.
| | 02:48 |
Now before we move on and start
painting, I want to leave you with a very
| | 02:52 |
important concept and that's that
each tool has its own settings in the
| | 02:58 |
Paint and Brushes panels.
| | 02:59 |
For instance, when I have the Brush
tool selected, any changes I make to
| | 03:05 |
the Color or the Size of the brush, the
Opacity and so on, only affect the Brush tool.
| | 03:11 |
Also note that the Clone Options are
grayed out, as is the Erase menu, that's
| | 03:16 |
because these are only applicable
when you have those tools selected.
| | 03:20 |
For instance, if I select the Eraser,
then the pop-up for Erase becomes active.
| | 03:27 |
The Clone tools are still grayed out.
| | 03:30 |
These only become active
when the Clone tool is selected.
| | 03:33 |
So one thing you really have to watch
is that when you're using these settings,
| | 03:37 |
you have a tendency, or at least I do,
of changing, say the color, let's pick a
| | 03:44 |
green and then changing the tool to the
Brush tool, and I start painting and my
| | 03:50 |
paint appears in red, by just a
setting that was applied to the Brush tool.
| | 03:54 |
I only changed the color
for the Clone Stamp tool.
| | 03:57 |
So try and get in the habit of first
selecting the tool you want to use and then
| | 04:01 |
changing the size, the color and so on.
| | 04:03 |
Most of the options in the Brushes
panel are fairly self-explanatory.
| | 04:08 |
If you have ever used Photoshop, you
will be pretty familiar with changing the
| | 04:11 |
size of brushes as well as their
Angle, Roundness, Hardness and so on.
| | 04:17 |
However, I really point out that if
you have a tablet, and you pull down
| | 04:21 |
the Brushes panel a little further, you will
find options for setting the Brush Dynamics.
| | 04:27 |
The default is to only use the
Size and that's set to Pen Pressure.
| | 04:32 |
You can turn that off and
use some of the other settings.
| | 04:34 |
Or instead of Pen Pressure, you can use
Pen Tilt or Stylus Wheel and so on.
| | 04:40 |
And again you have the same options for
Angle, Roundness, Opacity and Flow.
| | 04:44 |
I'll use a tablet in the next movie,
but I just want to show you that they are
| | 04:48 |
hidden at the bottom of the Brushes
panel, in case you haven't found them.
| | 04:52 |
And as for the for the Paint panel,
some of these options are easy to
| | 04:55 |
understand, such as Opacity and Flow.
| | 04:58 |
Flow is how quickly paint is drawn on,
the size of the brush, the paint color,
| | 05:04 |
Foreground and Background and there is
also an option to Reset the foreground
| | 05:08 |
and background colors to black and
white and you can switch that by clicking on
| | 05:12 |
the little arrows. That can be handy
when you are painting in the alpha channel.
| | 05:16 |
Right below this are options for
setting the Blending mode, Channels you are
| | 05:21 |
painting on and the duration of each stroke.
| | 05:24 |
We'll be covering these
options in the next few movies.
| | 05:38 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Brush tool basics| 00:07 |
In the previous movie, we
set our workspace to Paint.
| | 00:11 |
This opens the Layer panel and
the Composition panel side by side.
| | 00:15 |
Remember that to paint, you need to
have the Layer panel open and to use the
| | 00:19 |
painting tools in the Layer panel only.
| | 00:21 |
Well, I created one paint stroke
which applied, if you notice in the
| | 00:26 |
Timeline, the Paint effect.
| | 00:28 |
If you have been playing around, let's
just start over and delete the effect.
| | 00:32 |
I'll select Remove All from the Effect
menu and now we can get back to a clean slate.
| | 00:37 |
The first thing I'll do
is reselect the Brush tool.
| | 00:40 |
In the Paint panel, I am going to check
that the blending mode is set to Normal,
| | 00:45 |
and you have all the other
blending modes available.
| | 00:48 |
And we'll explore some of
the other options later on.
| | 00:50 |
I'll also check that the
Channels is set to RGBA.
| | 00:54 |
This means that I'll be painting in all
four channels, Red, Green, Blue and Alpha.
| | 00:59 |
I'll check that Duration is set to Constant.
| | 01:02 |
This means that any paint stroke I
make will exist for the duration of the comp,
| | 01:06 |
starting at the current time.
| | 01:08 |
So if I am using Constant, and I start
to paint at this point in time,
| | 01:14 |
any paint stroke I create will only
exist from this time forward.
| | 01:19 |
If I go earlier in time,
that stroke will disappear.
| | 01:22 |
You will also notice the
slight issue with the redraw.
| | 01:25 |
As I am scrubbing the Timeline, only the
Composition panel is updating in real time.
| | 01:32 |
Until I release the Current Time
Indicator, the Layer panel is not updating.
| | 01:36 |
Now once you have drawn a stroke,
each stroke appears in the Timeline.
| | 01:41 |
If I twirl down the Paint effect,
you can see that Brush 1 appears
| | 01:46 |
and here you can see it only begins at this point in time.
| | 01:49 |
Fortunately, if you make a mistake, you can
simply drag these bars back and forth in time.
| | 01:55 |
I can have it start at the beginning and
don't worry if it looks a little short.
| | 02:00 |
Paint strokes don't have any set duration.
| | 02:02 |
If you want it to be longer or shorter, you
can simply drag the beginning or end of the bar.
| | 02:07 |
Now for an important warning:
| | 02:10 |
once you start editing a stroke in
the Timeline, it will be selected.
| | 02:15 |
You need to deselect the
stroke before you continue painting.
| | 02:18 |
Let's say I'd like another
brushstroke and maybe we'll change the color.
| | 02:23 |
We'll maybe make it blue.
| | 02:24 |
I want to also make it a
little bigger, so you can see it.
| | 02:28 |
Because I have Brush #1 selected, as
soon as I create a second stroke, it
| | 02:33 |
replaces Brush #1.Before you continue
painting, get in the habit of pressing F2,
| | 02:39 |
that's Function Key 2, to deselect all.
| | 02:43 |
And now you can just start painting.
You will notice there is no issue with
| | 02:46 |
replacing my strokes, so long as I don't
have a stroke selected in the Timeline.
| | 02:51 |
If I select one however, the next stroke,
I paint, will replace the selected stroke.
| | 02:57 |
Anytime you want to start over, just select
the strokes you have created and press Delete.
| | 03:02 |
You can also delete the effect.
| | 03:04 |
This time I'll press Home to send my
current time marker to the beginning of the comp.
| | 03:09 |
Now every stroke I create
will start at time zero.
| | 03:13 |
I can select one of the brush sizes
directly from the Brushes panel, set the
| | 03:17 |
Diameter and the Hardness or even
easier, you can set your Brush size and
| | 03:23 |
Hardness interactively in the Layer panel.
| | 03:26 |
You do that by pressing the Command key
on Mac, Ctrl key on Windows and as you
| | 03:31 |
drag, you are changing the Diameter.
| | 03:35 |
You can see that value increase
and decrease in the Brushes panel.
| | 03:39 |
As soon as you are happy with the size
that you've created, release the Command
| | 03:43 |
key and then start moving your mouse to
set the Hardness value and again you can
| | 03:48 |
see that update in the Brushes panel.
| | 03:52 |
Now I'd have a nice large brush. I'll undo.
| | 03:56 |
Remember, that if you have a pressure
sensitive tablet, you can set options for
| | 04:00 |
Brush Dynamics in the Brushes panel.
| | 04:02 |
For now I'll just set the size to Pen
Pressure and I'll bring this up a little
| | 04:07 |
bit, so I have more space in my Timeline.
| | 04:08 |
And I am using the Pen, I can press
slightly for a small stroke and as I
| | 04:14 |
increase pressure, the stroke will get larger.
| | 04:18 |
I'll undo and I think I'll go back to
using the mouse just because it makes it
| | 04:21 |
easier and I'm showing you the various menus.
| | 04:24 |
So I'll go ahead and I'll make a
slightly smaller paintbrush, maybe even smaller
| | 04:28 |
again and I'll just make a
couple of simple strokes.
| | 04:32 |
I mentioned that Paint was an effect
and in the View pop-up, you can see that
| | 04:37 |
the Paint Effect renders after Masks.
| | 04:40 |
One handy thing about having paint as
an effect is that if you apply another
| | 04:45 |
effect, let's just say we apply
Color Correction>Hue/Saturation.
| | 04:50 |
In the Effects panel, I can
reorder the Paint Effect and the
| | 04:54 |
Hue/Saturation Effect.
| | 04:56 |
If I change the Master Saturation, it
changes the colors of the paint strokes.
| | 05:02 |
However, if I drag the Hue/
Saturation Effect above the Paint Effect, the
| | 05:07 |
Hue/Saturation is only being applied
to the mask image and the paint strokes
| | 05:11 |
remain in their original color.
| | 05:13 |
Now you might have noticed that in the Layer
panel the paint strokes are no longer visible.
| | 05:18 |
This is where you need to
keep an eye on the View pop-up.
| | 05:21 |
If you have other effects applied, and
you want to continue painting, you might
| | 05:26 |
need to reselect the Paint Effect and
that way any additional paint strokes you
| | 05:30 |
apply will be added to the same Paint
Effect. However you can have multiple
| | 05:36 |
Paint Effects if that's what you're looking for.
| | 05:38 |
I think I'll delete that Color Correction.
| | 05:41 |
Also notice that in the Effect Controls
panel, the Paint Effect doesn't have all
| | 05:46 |
of the options you see in the Timeline.
| | 05:49 |
The only option you get
is to Paint on Transparent.
| | 05:52 |
And you can toggle that on and off.
| | 05:54 |
When Paint on Transparent is enabled,
the original image will disappear.
| | 05:59 |
The only image I am seeing
now are the paint strokes.
| | 06:03 |
This is usually more useful if you're
painting on a black solid, because when
| | 06:07 |
you are painting on a solid, you
might want the solid to be transparent.
| | 06:11 |
However, there's no need to open the
Effect Controls panel simply to toggle on
| | 06:16 |
and off that switch.
| | 06:18 |
That option also appears in the Timeline.
| | 06:20 |
If I click on Off, it toggles to On, but
if I click on On, it toggles back to Off.
| | 06:26 |
So in many cases you don't need to open
the Effect Controls panel if all you're
| | 06:30 |
doing is just painting on a layer.
| | 06:32 |
So, have some fun playing around with
some paint strokes and just remember if
| | 06:36 |
you select a brush in the Timeline and
you make a new stroke, it will replace
| | 06:41 |
the existing stroke.
| | 06:43 |
In the next movie, we'll cover some
of the options for duration,
| | 06:47 |
including single frame and custom.
| | 07:00 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Duration options| 00:07 |
I'm still in the first composition.
| | 00:09 |
I selected the layer, and selected a
Effect > Remove All. That removes the paint
| | 00:14 |
effect and starts over with a clean slate.
| | 00:17 |
I will select the Brush tool and then
in this movie we're going to cover the
| | 00:21 |
options for Duration including Single
Frame and Custom. I'll cover the Write On
| | 00:26 |
option in the later movie.
| | 00:28 |
So set the Duration pop up to Single Frame.
I have a pretty large brush here, so let
| | 00:33 |
me just change it to something very
small and any color will do by the way.
| | 00:38 |
I will press the Home key and that
will set the current time marker to the
| | 00:42 |
beginning of the comp and just
make the little stroke there.
| | 00:45 |
Now I'll twirl down the paint effect in
the time-line, and Brush number 1 is a
| | 00:50 |
single frame in duration.
| | 00:52 |
To see this better I'll the press Semicolon (;)
| | 00:56 |
that's the shortcut to
zoom in as far as possible.
| | 00:59 |
Now you'll see stripes in the
timeline indicating individual frames.
| | 01:04 |
I can press Page Down to advance one
more frame and you'll notice my first
| | 01:08 |
stroke is no longer visible, it's only
showing on the first frame, let's make
| | 01:13 |
another stroke Page Down
again and make another stroke.
| | 01:17 |
Now since I'm right handed taking my
hand off the mouse to use Page Up and Page
| | 01:22 |
Down, is little awkward.
| | 01:24 |
Instead I'm going to use the shortcuts 1 and 2.
| | 01:28 |
When I use 1 and 2 and that's on the
normal keyboard, pressing 1 will go back in
| | 01:33 |
time and pressing 2 will go forward,
so let's go forward one more frame.
| | 01:38 |
I'll press 2 and now I can keep my right
hand on the mouse or the pan and press 2
| | 01:44 |
every time I want to advance another
frame, I'll press 2 again and this time
| | 01:49 |
I'll set the duration
from single frame to custom.
| | 01:53 |
The default is to use one frame, so
click on this and change it to however many
| | 01:58 |
number frames you like, let's say it's two.
| | 02:01 |
Now when I create a stroke each stroke
will ask for two frames and not only that
| | 02:07 |
when I press two to advance to the
next frame it knows how many frames I have
| | 02:12 |
the custom value set to.
| | 02:14 |
Now I can quickly add strokes pressing
2 to advance to the next custom frame
| | 02:20 |
that I want to paint on, and again you
can change this to however many number
| | 02:24 |
of frames you want to paint on, let's
say I do with the three and we'll just do
| | 02:28 |
a couple more here.
| | 02:29 |
Let me just set the work area, I'll
go to 1 second press N on the keyboard
| | 02:37 |
and that sets the work area to end of
the current time, so let's cover few
| | 02:42 |
options for RAM Previewing.
| | 02:44 |
When the time line is selected and I
press 0 on the keypad, it'll RAM preview
| | 02:50 |
the Composition panel and that's the default.
| | 02:54 |
Likewise the Comp panel
could also have been selected.
| | 02:58 |
Notice that when the Comp panel is
previewing the work area is always honored,
| | 03:04 |
but let's say, I was painting
and the Layer panel was forward.
| | 03:07 |
When you press RAM Preview the preview
plays back in the Layer panel, but it
| | 03:11 |
doesn't honor the work area.
| | 03:14 |
What I like to do is turn on this
switch for Always Preview This View.
| | 03:19 |
You'll find these switches at the
bottom of the Composition panel, and the
| | 03:23 |
bottom of the Layer panel and these
of course are mutually exclusive.
| | 03:27 |
If I talk along the Always Preview
This View for the Comp panel, it turns off
| | 03:32 |
the switch for the Layer panel and
vice versa, so let say I turn it on for
| | 03:37 |
the Composition panel.
| | 03:38 |
I will press Home to return to 0 and I
add another stroke, when I RAM preview,
| | 03:44 |
it previews the Composition panel
that way I can see my paint strokes in
| | 03:49 |
relation to all the other layers.
| | 03:50 |
If you're going to use this feature by
the way, be sure to turn it off before
| | 03:56 |
you move on to another composition.
| | 03:58 |
Always Preview This View
doesn't mean just inside this comp.
| | 04:02 |
It means any time you RAM preview this
will be the comp that'll start previewing
| | 04:08 |
even if another comp is forward or
another comp in a nested chain of comps.
| | 04:13 |
So while that's a handy feature, I don't
like to leave it enabled, you might just
| | 04:18 |
want to get in the habit of bringing
the time line forward when you RAM preview
| | 04:22 |
and that'll show you the
animation in the Comp panel by default.
| | 04:26 |
In the next movie, we'll cover the
Modes pop-up and the Channels pop-up.
| | 04:42 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Channel modes and other settings| 00:07 |
In this movie, we'll cover some
options for the Channels pop-up and the Modes
| | 00:11 |
pop-up by adding some colorful
eyeshadow to the mask's eyes.
| | 00:16 |
I'll start by setting up my workspace.
| | 00:18 |
First I'll remove the paint effect that
will delete all the strokes I've created
| | 00:22 |
in the previous movie.
| | 00:24 |
I'll press the semicolon (;)
| | 00:25 |
shortcut and that will zoom all the
way out. You may have to that twice
| | 00:29 |
depending on where you're at. Then I'll
double-click the work area to reset the
| | 00:33 |
work area to the entire
length of the composition.
| | 00:36 |
I'll also want to zoom in on these eyes.
| | 00:38 |
The Selection tool is currently active
so I'll press and hold down the Z key and
| | 00:43 |
that will give me the Zoom tool.
| | 00:45 |
I'll click a few times to zoom in and
when I release the Z key, it will return
| | 00:50 |
to the last tool that I was using.
| | 00:51 |
Then I can press the Spacebar to pan
around and center, and you can even zoom in
| | 00:56 |
a little further just so
we can see what we're doing.
| | 01:00 |
I'll select the Brush tool as
before and let's check a couple of our
| | 01:03 |
settings over here.
| | 01:05 |
Let's make sure the Duration is set
to Constant, then if we press Home, our
| | 01:10 |
strokes will exist for the
entire length of the composition.
| | 01:13 |
I also want to pick a smaller brush,
in this case, I'll just select the brush
| | 01:18 |
from the Brushes panel, let's say the 27.
| | 01:19 |
That looks like it should work, and
let's compare the differences between
| | 01:24 |
setting channels to RGB and Alpha and RGB only.
| | 01:28 |
We will explore the Alpha Channel
option in a movie later in the lesson.
| | 01:32 |
So for now, let's select the default
RGB plus Alpha, and since we're going to
| | 01:38 |
paint some eyeshadow, let's pick a
color that might look good. We'll click OK.
| | 01:43 |
So I'll paint one simple stroke around
the top of the eye, and notice that pink
| | 01:49 |
color is also drawing inside the eye.
| | 01:53 |
In other words, it's extending the RGB
channels and extending the Alpha channel.
| | 01:58 |
You can see that if you toggle on the
Transparency grid and you can also see it
| | 02:03 |
by toggling on the Alpha channel.
| | 02:04 |
So here you can see when I was painting the
pink it was adding white to the Alpha channel.
| | 02:11 |
So let's undo because we don't want
to actually extend the Alpha channel.
| | 02:15 |
To return to the RGB channels press
Option or Alt and click on the Show
| | 02:19 |
Channels pop-up again.
| | 02:21 |
Now let's set the Channels pop-up to RGB only.
| | 02:25 |
Now when I paint the color is drawn only
on the RGB channel, and that looks more
| | 02:31 |
correct to me at least. But let's say I
didn't want this pink color to be drawn,
| | 02:35 |
so obviously on the image I
wanted to use a Blending mode.
| | 02:40 |
And remember we have all of these
Blending modes to choose from, but let's say I
| | 02:43 |
forgot to set to Blending
mode before I started painting.
| | 02:46 |
Well fortunately, everything you do in
After Effects with a Paint Stroke can be
| | 02:51 |
edited in the timeline.
| | 02:53 |
In the timeline, click the arrow to the
left of Paint, and then you'll see Brush
| | 02:58 |
1 and it also has a twirly.
| | 03:00 |
When I expand Brush 1 it reveals a few
options for Path, Stroke Options, and
| | 03:07 |
Transformations, and every
individual brush stroke you create have all of
| | 03:12 |
these options available.
| | 03:13 |
Let's just give the timeline a little
bit more space as we twirl these down.
| | 03:17 |
Inside the Stroke options are most of
the settings that you see inside the
| | 03:22 |
Paint and Brushes panels.
| | 03:24 |
And you notice here, I can even set the
Channels with a stroke after the fact.
| | 03:29 |
So earlier, when I had drawn it as RGB
and Alpha I could have simply changed the
| | 03:34 |
stroke here in the timeline, I
didn't actually have to draw it again.
| | 03:39 |
The same goes for the Blending mode;
| | 03:41 |
once I have the stroke drawn, I can change
the Blending mode for any existing stroke.
| | 03:47 |
For this stroke I think a mode like
Color should work pretty well, that will
| | 03:51 |
add the Hue and Saturation of the pink color
but use the luminance of the existing layer.
| | 03:56 |
And at this point, you might
find you don't even like this color.
| | 04:00 |
Well, fortunately, I can also
change the color after the fact as well.
| | 04:04 |
Let's say I'd like to use more of
lavender color, and of course you can change
| | 04:09 |
lots of other options including the
size, the angle, the hardness, and so on.
| | 04:15 |
Further down, the Opacity value can be
very useful because you may not want the
| | 04:19 |
color to be quite that strong, and
you can also animate opacity to make the
| | 04:23 |
color fade in or fade off.
| | 04:26 |
In fact, you can animate
all of these parameters.
| | 04:28 |
In the next movie we'll cover
animating the stroke using Start and End.
| | 04:33 |
The next set of options Transformations,
look if you control over the Anchor
| | 04:37 |
Point, Position, Scale, and
Rotation of each individual stroke.
| | 04:41 |
You'll notice the Anchor Point is
placed at the beginning of the stroke.
| | 04:46 |
Unfortunately, it's not
possible to edit the shape of the path;
| | 04:50 |
even though it's a vector
stroke it has no handles or points.
| | 04:54 |
However you can animate the Path
parameter to interpret between different shapes.
| | 05:00 |
Simply turn on the stopwatch for this
point in time, go later in time, make sure
| | 05:05 |
Brush 1 is selected and draw a second
stroke and the two paths will interpolate
| | 05:10 |
between the first
keyframe and the second keyframe.
| | 05:13 |
You should be pretty
familiar with transformations.
| | 05:16 |
If you're free to have a little fun
play around with those options and when
| | 05:19 |
you're done, let's create a second brush stroke.
| | 05:22 |
I'll pull this down a little, and this
time since we know what blending mode we
| | 05:26 |
like we can select the blending
mode before we start painting.
| | 05:30 |
You'll notice that the color in the
Paint panel is the original pink color.
| | 05:37 |
Now I've noticed, I've made a classic mistake.
| | 05:40 |
I mentioned before that if you have a
Brush selected, it's so easy to replace
| | 05:45 |
your first stroke when you
go to make a second stroke.
| | 05:48 |
So keep an eye on this, it's not too
late to just simply Undo, press F2 to
| | 05:54 |
deselect the stroke and then
go and create a new stroke.
| | 05:57 |
Of course at this point, I will
probably want to select the Color and the
| | 06:02 |
Opacity from the first stroke and
paste them to the second stroke.
| | 06:06 |
Select the second brush and paste.
| | 06:10 |
In the next movie, we'll add some
color to the lips and I'll show you how to
| | 06:14 |
animate on the stroke.
| | 06:26 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating strokes| 00:07 |
In this movie, we'll add some color
to the lips and I'll show you how to
| | 00:11 |
animate on a stroke.
| | 00:13 |
To get setup, I'll make sure I have the
Brush tool selected, and that I have a
| | 00:17 |
color that I'm going to use.
| | 00:19 |
Feel free to use any foreground color
you like, and I think a size of about 27
| | 00:22 |
that I have here is looking about right.
| | 00:26 |
I'll leave my Blending mode set to
Color, for the Channels pop-up, it doesn't
| | 00:31 |
matter whether you set it to RGB, or
RGB plus Alpha, since we're only painting
| | 00:36 |
inside the original image.
| | 00:38 |
I'll press Home so that my stroke
starts at the beginning of the comp, I'll be
| | 00:42 |
sure to press F2 to deselect any
other strokes that might be selected.
| | 00:47 |
Now in one continuous stroke, I'll paint
around the lips, returning back to the beginning.
| | 00:54 |
As soon as I'm finished painting I
can press the V key to return to the
| | 00:58 |
Selection tool, that way I can be sure
I'm not going to add any extra strokes by
| | 01:03 |
accident or replace an existing stroke.
| | 01:05 |
Now I have three strokes, and if you
want to keep track of which one is which,
| | 01:10 |
you can rename each individual stroke.
| | 01:13 |
To do that select Brush 1, press
Return on the keyboard, and let's call this
| | 01:19 |
'left eye' hit Return. Select Brush 2
press Return, and we'll call this 'right
| | 01:26 |
eye', press Return again.
| | 01:28 |
The last stroke is for the lips.
| | 01:31 |
To animate on the stroke over the time
all we need to do is twirl down the lips,
| | 01:36 |
twirl down Stroke Options.
| | 01:38 |
The two parameters we're
interested in are Start and End.
| | 01:42 |
Go ahead and scrub the value for
Start from 0 to 100, and you will see the
| | 01:46 |
stroke we will animate on, but in this
case, it's actually wiping off from the
| | 01:52 |
beginning to the end.
| | 01:53 |
I'll set it back to 0% and now
let's check out the End parameter.
| | 01:57 |
When I scrub the End parameter from 100%
back to 0, the stroke wipes off in reverse.
| | 02:05 |
So it looks like if I animate from 0 to
100, I'll get the effect I'm looking for.
| | 02:09 |
So at time zero, I'll turn on the
stopwatch for End and that sets the first
| | 02:14 |
keyframe to 0%, and let's go a little
later in time, let's say one second and
| | 02:20 |
let's scrub the value back to 100.
| | 02:22 |
And I'll also go little further in
time and press End to end the work area
| | 02:28 |
at this point in time.
| | 02:29 |
You'll notice now as you scrub the
timeline, the stroke updates in the
| | 02:34 |
Composition panel but does not update in
the Layer panel until you release the mouse.
| | 02:39 |
But since we're finished with our
painting for now, let's increase the size
| | 02:43 |
of the Composition panel, so that when we RAM
preview we can see how it looks in the Comp panel.
| | 02:49 |
And of course if you had other layers
playing you can see how all the layers
| | 02:53 |
are working in unison.
| | 02:55 |
Remember that it's very easy to copy
and paste keyframes to other strokes.
| | 02:59 |
So if I want to animate on the eyelids,
all I need to do is click on the word
| | 03:04 |
End and that will select both keyframes for End.
| | 03:08 |
Now, I need to copy them
Command+C on Mac, Ctrl+C on Windows.
| | 03:13 |
We'll twirl up that layer;
| | 03:15 |
I'll select the right eye and the
left eye but be careful when you paste
| | 03:20 |
keyframes they always paste at the current time.
| | 03:23 |
So I'll press Home to return to time
zero, and with both layers selected I'll
| | 03:28 |
press Command+V to paste the keyframes,
and, when I hit Play by pressing the
| | 03:32 |
Spacebar, all of the strokes
start animating at the same time.
| | 03:36 |
Of course, I can simply drag this
stroke for the lips later in time, and now
| | 03:41 |
when I RAM preview, you can see the
eyes wipe on first followed by the lips.
| | 03:45 |
Now that you have the basics down, in
the next movie we'll look at the options
| | 03:50 |
for the Eraser tool.
| | 04:03 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. The Eraser ToolErasing different channels| 00:07 |
You can use the Eraser tool to remove
parts of an image or just part of an
| | 00:12 |
existing paint stroke.
| | 00:13 |
You can also use it just in the Alpha channel.
| | 00:17 |
To get started, add any image to a
composition, preferably one that has an
| | 00:21 |
interesting Alpha channel.
| | 00:23 |
I'll continue with the same
composition I was using in the previous lesson.
| | 00:28 |
The first thing to do is
to select the Eraser tool.
| | 00:31 |
Remember that the options in the
Paint and Brushes panels are different
| | 00:35 |
depending of which tool is selected.
| | 00:37 |
So be sure to select the Eraser tool first.
| | 00:39 |
I will start with the default settings
which is to set the Channels pop-up to
| | 00:45 |
RGB and Alpha, you have the same
options as you had with the Brush tool;
| | 00:49 |
the Duration to Constant and again,
these are same options we had for brushes.
| | 00:55 |
I won't be using all the
different options for the Eraser;
| | 00:57 |
I am just going to set it to the Constant mode.
| | 01:00 |
The Erase options are only
available when the Eraser tool is active.
| | 01:05 |
The default is to erase the Layer Source,
the image itself, as well as any paint
| | 01:11 |
strokes that are applied to the image.
| | 01:12 |
The other options are to only erase the
paint strokes or to only erase the
| | 01:18 |
Last Stroke you painted.
| | 01:19 |
We'll cover these options in the next movie.
| | 01:22 |
For now, let's leave it
set to layer Source & Paint.
| | 01:26 |
I will find an area of the
image I would like erase.
| | 01:29 |
I can only zoom in so you can see
things in the little more detail.
| | 01:34 |
Remember, the shortcut for
setting the size of the brush;
| | 01:37 |
this also works for the eraser.
| | 01:38 |
I will press the Command key, size
the brush and I will pick a size I think
| | 01:44 |
is pretty generous.
| | 01:45 |
Let go of the Command key and then
I can set the size to the hardest.
| | 01:49 |
I am just going to start
erasing this corner of the image.
| | 01:53 |
Let's just say, I don't want that to be there.
| | 01:57 |
If you find your brushes too small or
too large, it might be better to undo the
| | 02:02 |
stroke and set it to a different size
and notice I'm trying to erase this area
| | 02:07 |
using one Brush stroke.
| | 02:10 |
I'm not dabbing at it.
| | 02:12 |
When I release the mouse, you can
see in the timeline that the stroke I
| | 02:16 |
painted is called Eraser 1, and you can animate
this just like you could with the paint brush.
| | 02:22 |
And that's the reason I wasn't dabbing
at it the way I might if I was erasing
| | 02:26 |
pixels because every time I paint with
the eraser, I am creating a vector stroke
| | 02:31 |
just like with the Paint tool.
| | 02:33 |
So I don't want to have
multiple strokes to manage.
| | 02:35 |
So that's the result when you paint
with the Channel set to RGB and Alpha.
| | 02:41 |
You are painting to transparency.
| | 02:44 |
Anytime you want to check that, turn
on the Transparency Grid and you can see
| | 02:48 |
that area is now transparent.
| | 02:50 |
I will undo to get back the original image
and I will change the Channels pop-up to RGB.
| | 02:57 |
Now when I erase, I will be replacing
the image with the background color and
| | 03:03 |
you can see that as I start painting.
| | 03:04 |
Now you might be saying to yourself
that looks just like the previous example.
| | 03:10 |
But when I toggle on the Transparency
Grid, you can see I have replaced it with
| | 03:15 |
black and it's important to realize
whenever you are using the eraser, you are
| | 03:19 |
always erasing to the background color.
| | 03:23 |
Remember, if you set the Comps
background color to the same color as the
| | 03:27 |
background color in paint and you set
Channels to RGB where you are replacing
| | 03:32 |
the image with the background color,
you won't be able to tell the difference
| | 03:36 |
until you toggle on the Transparency
Grid which is something to keep in mind.
| | 03:41 |
Unfortunately, unlike the Paint Brush,
the Eraser 1 stroke in the timeline does
| | 03:47 |
not have a Channels pop-up.
| | 03:48 |
So you are not able to change the
mode for Channels after the fact.
| | 03:53 |
So I will just select the Eraser 1 and
delete it or you can just press Undo.
| | 03:58 |
The last option on the Channels is to only
use the Eraser tool in the Alpha channel.
| | 04:04 |
As soon as I set it to Alpha, you will
notice that the colors change through
| | 04:08 |
black and white, even if you click on
the foreground color or the background
| | 04:12 |
color and try to change it to a color,
once you have the Channels set to Alpha,
| | 04:17 |
you will only be painting
or erasing in shades of gray.
| | 04:21 |
And by the way, in the next chapter, we
will be painting in the Alpha channel.
| | 04:26 |
Remember, when you are using the
Eraser tool, you are always erasing to
| | 04:30 |
the background color.
| | 04:31 |
So let's say I want to paint
in the Alpha channel with black.
| | 04:36 |
Make sure black appears as the background color.
| | 04:39 |
You can just click this little
switch here to quickly set it to black and
| | 04:42 |
white and then toggle the foreground
and background colors to place Black in
| | 04:47 |
the background color.
| | 04:48 |
Now when I am painting, I am
actually painting black in the Alpha.
| | 04:53 |
And in this case, there is no difference
between painting black in the Alpha and
| | 04:58 |
simply erasing the RGB and Alpha image.
| | 05:01 |
Of course, if you are painting in the
Alpha channel, you may want to set the
| | 05:05 |
Channels pop-up to Alpha and then you can see
the Black and White alpha as you are erasing.
| | 05:11 |
If you want to replace some pixels with
white, you can switch the colors so that
| | 05:15 |
white is the background color.
| | 05:17 |
Remember, there is no reason why you
couldn't click on the Paint Brush, make
| | 05:22 |
sure the Paint Brush is also set to
Alpha and then you can paint in Black and
| | 05:26 |
White using the Paint tool.
| | 05:28 |
There is really no difference, although I see
here I have the Duration set to Single Frame.
| | 05:33 |
I will just switch that back to Constant.
| | 05:35 |
Of course, when I switch to using the
Brush tool, the size of my brush was
| | 05:41 |
different than the size
I had set for the Eraser.
| | 05:44 |
So keep an eye on that.
| | 05:45 |
You might want them to match.
| | 05:47 |
The big difference with using the Brush
tool is that I will always be painting
| | 05:51 |
with the foreground color,
in this case, that's black.
| | 05:55 |
If I want to paint with white, I need to
make sure the white is the foreground color.
| | 05:59 |
So again, that's the
opposite of the Eraser tool.
| | 06:02 |
I am going to return to the Eraser tool
and let me just explain one last thing
| | 06:07 |
that might trip you up.
| | 06:08 |
I will select all those brushes that I
created by accident, quite a few of them
| | 06:14 |
here, and we will get
back to the original image.
| | 06:17 |
Notice I am still painting in the
Alpha channel and I am going to be erasing
| | 06:21 |
to the white color.
| | 06:23 |
Notice if I actually extend the Alpha
channel and make it larger, you might see
| | 06:29 |
some artifacts in the Color channels.
| | 06:31 |
I will switch back to viewing RGB and
you can see that the edge of the Color
| | 06:36 |
channels looks really bad.
| | 06:38 |
I will undo and I will
turn on the Transparency Grid.
| | 06:42 |
Normally, the edge of your image looks
really smooth and that's because you are
| | 06:47 |
viewing it with a nice
anti-aliased Alpha channel.
| | 06:51 |
But underneath the hood, After Effects
is compositing this image with the Color
| | 06:56 |
channels in straight RGB mode and
what that means is that the color pixels
| | 07:01 |
actually extend passed the
edge of the Alpha channel.
| | 07:05 |
You can see this very clearly if you
set the Show channels to RGB Straight.
| | 07:11 |
Now you can see what the RGB
channels actually look like before the Alpha
| | 07:16 |
channel is composited.
| | 07:17 |
So when you extend the white area in the
Alpha channel, you are simply revealing
| | 07:22 |
these pixels which you
probably don't want to reveal.
| | 07:25 |
So keep that in mind that this is
actually how it's supposed to work if you
| | 07:29 |
happen to be painting the Alpha channel
and you happen to extend the white area
| | 07:34 |
of the Alpha outside of the
original Alpha channel. This is not a bug.
| | 07:38 |
So let's undo again.
| | 07:40 |
So I think that covers the various
options under Channels and return to
| | 07:45 |
erasing RGB and Alpha, and in the next
movie, I will cover the various options
| | 07:50 |
in the Erase pop-up.
| | 08:03 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Eraser tool modes| 00:07 |
In this movie we'll continue
to explore the Eraser tool.
| | 00:11 |
So make sure it's selected, check
the Channels is set to RGB plus Alpha,
| | 00:17 |
Duration is Constant and now let's
look at the different modes we have
| | 00:21 |
available in the Erase menu.
| | 00:23 |
So far we've only been
using Layer Source and Paint.
| | 00:27 |
Let me erase the Layer Source and
Paint, and let me set this brush a little
| | 00:31 |
smaller, it will erase the image and
the paint stroke or just the image.
| | 00:38 |
I'll undo and now let's
set it to Paint Only mode.
| | 00:42 |
In this mode, only the
paint strokes will be deleted.
| | 00:46 |
So this allows me to remove some of the
paint strokes that I'm not happy with.
| | 00:52 |
When I erase in Paint Only mode it also
creates a eraser strokes in the timeline.
| | 00:58 |
I'll delete these just so I
can show you the next option.
| | 01:01 |
Earlier, I created three strokes, the
left eye and the right eye and by the way
| | 01:08 |
I did increase the opacity back to 100%
so you could see the color more clearly.
| | 01:13 |
The last stroke I created is for the lips.
| | 01:17 |
When I set the Erase pop-up to Last
Stroke Only it will only act on the
| | 01:22 |
last stroke I created.
| | 01:24 |
So that's why I removed the eraser strokes
because you can actually erase the eraser stokes.
| | 01:28 |
So now the last stroke I
created was the color around the lips.
| | 01:34 |
If you haven't got any paint strokes yet,
go ahead and create a paint stroke so
| | 01:38 |
that way you can test out this feature.
| | 01:39 |
So let's say I like to remove a
little bit of paint that may have spilled
| | 01:43 |
over around the edge.
| | 01:45 |
In Last Stroke Only mode I can remove
a little bit of the color just on this
| | 01:50 |
edge that I wasn't happy with.
| | 01:53 |
And there is something very important to
remember about the Last Stroke Only mode.
| | 01:57 |
If you noticed in the Timeline it
did not create an eraser stroke.
| | 02:02 |
If I made a mistake when I was
painting my last stroke I might want to just
| | 02:06 |
remove a little bit of paint without
starting over and without cluttering up my
| | 02:11 |
Timeline with lots and lots of eraser strokes.
| | 02:15 |
When the Eraser is set to Last Stroke
Only, there is no reason why you can't dab
| | 02:19 |
at the paint stroke and remove little
parts of it because you don't have to
| | 02:23 |
worry about creating multiple eraser strokes.
| | 02:25 |
You'll probably find this
feature extremely useful.
| | 02:29 |
Let's try another example and then I'll show
you a more efficient way of working with it.
| | 02:34 |
I'll return to the Brush tool and
I'll set the mode back to Color.
| | 02:39 |
Since we know it works pretty
well painting on top of the mask.
| | 02:42 |
I'll set the Channels to RGB and
Alpha and we'll pick a nice color, maybe a
| | 02:49 |
little bit of rouge, maybe a little
pinker and we'll set the Opacity down a
| | 02:54 |
little bit and we'll get a nice big brush.
| | 02:57 |
So let me say I just wanted to paint a
little bit of rouge around here and then
| | 03:03 |
I say I like most of it but I don't
really want this portion right here.
| | 03:09 |
In order to start erasing I might want
to set my Eraser to roughly the same
| | 03:14 |
size as my paintbrush.
| | 03:15 |
So you'll want to do
that first before you go on.
| | 03:18 |
So I'll set the Eraser tool and we'll
get a slightly bigger brush and I'll just
| | 03:23 |
set the Hardness to zero,
so it's also nice and soft.
| | 03:27 |
I'll make sure my Eraser is set to
Last Stroke Only and now I can remove a
| | 03:33 |
little part of the color
that I wasn't happy with.
| | 03:36 |
Again, the last stroke was Brush 1 and I
could call this right cheek, and notice
| | 03:44 |
none of the eraser strokes
are appearing in the Timeline.
| | 03:48 |
So now that the Eraser tool has the
right size of brush, let me show you an even
| | 03:52 |
faster way to do this.
| | 03:54 |
I'll return to using the Brush
tool and we'll paint the other cheek.
| | 03:58 |
Now I'm noticing that my previous stroke is
still selected, because I've just renamed it.
| | 04:02 |
So I'll press the F2 key to deselect.
| | 04:06 |
Otherwise, I'll just replace my other stroke.
| | 04:08 |
I'll paint some color on the other cheek.
I have the same color in settings and
| | 04:13 |
then now to erase the portions that I
don't need, I simply press Command+Shift
| | 04:17 |
on Mac, Ctrl+Shift on Windows and that
switches automatically to the Eraser tool
| | 04:23 |
in Last Stroke Only mode.
| | 04:25 |
So this is a very handy technique.
| | 04:27 |
Just so you can see another example
I'll move a little higher up the image.
| | 04:32 |
So you start painting with the
Brush tool. That adds a new brush stroke.
| | 04:39 |
When you press Command+Shift on Mac,
Ctrl+Shift on Windows it automatically
| | 04:44 |
switches to the Eraser tool.
| | 04:46 |
You can see that because the size
of the brush is a little different.
| | 04:49 |
Of course before you use this handy shortcut,
you will have to set the size of the brush.
| | 04:56 |
And again you can also make it very
small, so you can paint small strokes and
| | 05:02 |
when you press Command+Shift you'll get
whatever size the Eraser tool is set at.
| | 05:07 |
Also notice that I'm only erasing the
last stroke I've painted even though the
| | 05:12 |
eraser is moving over the eye lid.
| | 05:14 |
When I check the timeline I see only the
paint strokes and none of the eraser strokes.
| | 05:20 |
I think you get the idea.
| | 05:21 |
In the next chapter I'll show you how
to reveal an image over time by animating
| | 05:26 |
a paint stroke in the alpha channel.
| | 05:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Painting to RevealExamining a finished write-on animation| 00:07 |
If you've been following along so
far, I've closed the composition from
| | 00:10 |
the previous movie.
| | 00:13 |
If the Project panel is not visible,
you can bring it forward by selecting
| | 00:16 |
Window>Project or by using the shortcut.
| | 00:21 |
To show you what I mean by revealing a
layer, if you have the Exercise Files,
| | 00:25 |
twirl down Comps_finished and open
the second composition Write On_final.
| | 00:30 |
Since we don't need the Layer panel, I'll
just temporarily close it and I'll RAM Preview.
| | 00:36 |
You'll see a number of
layers are writing on overtime.
| | 00:41 |
I created all these layers by
hand and then scanned them in.
| | 00:43 |
I then combined them;
| | 00:45 |
using techniques you've learned in
earlier installments, such as blending modes,
| | 00:50 |
track mattes, frame blending
and even the wiggle expression.
| | 00:54 |
We'll solo the first layer called auto-
bird and we'll press U to see the keyframes.
| | 01:02 |
You can see that this layer is
wiping on over time, but it's not a
| | 01:07 |
simple transition that you might
get if you use the Linear Transition
| | 01:10 |
effect on animated mask.
| | 01:13 |
It zigs and zags and follows
the contour in an interesting way.
| | 01:16 |
Now we did this by painting on an
animated stroke in the layer's Alpha channel.
| | 01:21 |
By the way the reason, I call this
layer auto-bird is because I created it with
| | 01:27 |
an automatic pen which is an
interesting pen that calligraphers use.
| | 01:31 |
Now that we know what our goal is,
let's see how we would create this
| | 01:35 |
painterly transition.
| | 01:47 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a reveal stroke| 00:07 |
If you have the Exercise Files,
go ahead and open composition
| | 00:12 |
02-Write On*starter.
| | 00:14 |
If you don't have the Exercise Files,
just find any image such as our auto bird
| | 00:18 |
here that has an interesting
shape that you might like to write on.
| | 00:22 |
This technique will work with almost any image.
| | 00:25 |
My layer is currently on
a transparent background.
| | 00:29 |
In order to wipe on a layer,
it also has to be invisible.
| | 00:34 |
However, it's kind of hard to
paint on a layer if you can't see it.
| | 00:38 |
So we'll make the layer
invisible in a later step.
| | 00:41 |
So let's set up the Paint and Brush
panels so that we can write on this layer.
| | 00:46 |
The first thing we need to do is to double-
click the layer to open it in the Layer panel.
| | 00:50 |
So take a moment to set up your workspace,
remember, you have to paint in the Layer panel.
| | 00:56 |
We'll make sure we're at 100% and full
resolution and we'll select the Brush tool.
| | 01:03 |
The Paint and Brushes panel should
also be visible and they will be set to
| | 01:07 |
whatever settings you used in the last movie.
| | 01:09 |
We'll make sure Opacity is set
to 100% and Flow is set to 100%.
| | 01:16 |
The color we need to use is white.
| | 01:18 |
So I will just select the black and
white and then switch it so that white is
| | 01:22 |
the foreground color.
| | 01:24 |
I'll also make sure that the mode is
set to Normal and that the Channels
| | 01:29 |
pop-up is set to Alpha.
| | 01:31 |
Now, this is very important.
| | 01:34 |
We only want to paint the
white stroke in the layers Alpha.
| | 01:37 |
However if you do make a mistake, you
can always set the Channels pop-up after
| | 01:42 |
the fact in the Timeline.
| | 01:44 |
When you set Duration to Write On mode,
it automatically creates keyframes
| | 01:49 |
for the end parameter.
| | 01:51 |
Of course if you forget to set it
to Write On, you can just create the
| | 01:55 |
end keyframes later on.
| | 01:56 |
Now, even though we set the Paint panel
to only paint on Alpha, we'll probably
| | 02:02 |
also want to set Show Channels to Alpha channel.
| | 02:05 |
Remember you can toggle back and forth
quickly by Option or Alt+Clicking on the
| | 02:09 |
Show Channels button.
| | 02:11 |
You'll notice that the Alpha
channel has a little texture in it.
| | 02:14 |
That was picked up when I scanned the
image because I wrote on a textured paper.
| | 02:19 |
If you're using your own image, it's likely
the Alpha Channel will be completely white.
| | 02:24 |
The next thing we want
to do is set a Brush size.
| | 02:26 |
So I will press the Command key and size
my brush to somewhere around 50 pixels.
| | 02:32 |
Feel free to set the Hardness value to
taste. You can always change it later.
| | 02:36 |
I will set it to a medium hardness.
| | 02:39 |
I don't want it to be too
soft as I wipe on the stroke.
| | 02:41 |
Now when I am using Duration Write On,
the first keyframe for end will be placed
| | 02:48 |
at the current time.
| | 02:49 |
Also notice that the comp is 10 seconds long.
| | 02:52 |
When you're using Write On, it
automatically places the second keyframe when
| | 02:57 |
you release the mouse.
| | 02:58 |
So if you paint very slowly and take
longer than 10 second, your second keyframe
| | 03:03 |
will be after the end of the
comp and you'll have to retrieve it.
| | 03:08 |
On the other hand, you don't have to rush
and try to paint on your layer in real time.
| | 03:13 |
It's very easy to move the
second keyframe to retime the stroke.
| | 03:17 |
Just try to keep it under 10 seconds.
| | 03:19 |
Another thing you don't want to do is
start painting left and right like this.
| | 03:24 |
If that's all you're going to do,
you may as well just use a transition
| | 03:27 |
called Linear Wipe.
| | 03:29 |
What we're trying to do is get some
interesting movement and you can start at
| | 03:33 |
the top or at the bottom, but do try
and paint in one continuous stroke.
| | 03:38 |
Another thing I want to mention about timing.
| | 03:41 |
Let's say you start off painting very
slowly and then you go very quickly and
| | 03:45 |
then you go very slowly.
| | 03:47 |
All of that timing will be
embedded in your paint stroke.
| | 03:51 |
So even though when you're finished, you'll
end up with two keyframes that are linear.
| | 03:55 |
It doesn't mean that the personality
of your stroke will be linear in nature.
| | 04:00 |
After Effects will remember all
the subtle timing in your stroke.
| | 04:03 |
Of course you can always ease into or
ease out of those two keyframes, but a
| | 04:09 |
large amount of the personality is
embedded in the stroke as you paint.
| | 04:13 |
Now they're all set up, as soon as
we click with the mouse, it will start
| | 04:18 |
recording the stroke.
| | 04:19 |
Unfortunately, I just noticed that
I am painting with a black stroke.
| | 04:23 |
I always forget that when you change
the Channels to Alpha, it switches the
| | 04:27 |
colors to black and white.
| | 04:29 |
So I need to switch it back so that the
foreground color is white and we'll undo
| | 04:34 |
and let's start again.
| | 04:36 |
This time I will paint with
the tablet using Pen Pressure.
| | 04:40 |
I will start up slowly then pick up speed.
| | 04:44 |
You might have to try your stroke a few
times until you get a move that you like.
| | 04:48 |
Let's say I am happy with that.
| | 04:51 |
When I stop painting, the
stroke will seem to disappear.
| | 04:55 |
Not to worry, it's only because at
the current time, the animated stroke
| | 04:59 |
hasn't started yet.
| | 05:01 |
With the layers selected, I
will press U to see my keyframes.
| | 05:05 |
At this point I should see two
keyframes for end, but it looks like I took more
| | 05:10 |
than 10 seconds as the second
keyframe is after the end of the comp.
| | 05:15 |
But that's easy to fix.
| | 05:16 |
Instead of making the composition
longer you can simply drag this layer back
| | 05:21 |
and there is my keyframe and I probably
want the stroke to be only a few seconds long.
| | 05:26 |
Then I'll move the bar back, to make
sure the first keyframe starts at time zero.
| | 05:30 |
I'll move the second keyframe to
4 seconds and let's RAM preview.
| | 05:35 |
Remember that the preview
plays in the Comp panel.
| | 05:39 |
So we'll want to resize the panel.
| | 05:42 |
Notice that if you varied the speed when you
were drawing, it's reflected in the animation.
| | 05:46 |
I will press N to set the work area
at little after the second keyframe.
| | 05:52 |
If you find the animation is too
slow or too fast, just move the second
| | 05:56 |
keyframe to retime it.
| | 05:58 |
Before we move on, it's very important
to return to using the Selection tool, so
| | 06:03 |
you don't accidentally
replace your animated stroke.
| | 06:07 |
Notice that Brush 1 is selected in the Timeline.
| | 06:10 |
If I so much as click in the Layer
panel to bring it forward, I'll actually
| | 06:15 |
replace Brush 1, when I move the Time
Marker, I don't see my animated stroke
| | 06:19 |
anymore, because I've replaced it.
| | 06:21 |
If that happens to you, you can undo,
but it's best to return to the Selection
| | 06:26 |
tool as soon as you're
finished painting your stroke.
| | 06:30 |
In the next movie, I will show you how
to make the layer invisible and clean
| | 06:33 |
up the edges.
| | 06:45 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Finishing the reveal| 00:07 |
In the previous movie, you created an
animated stroke in the layer's Alpha Channel.
| | 00:12 |
If I bring the Layer panel forward and
scrub its timeline, I have painted an
| | 00:17 |
animated white stroke in the Alpha Channel.
| | 00:20 |
Because the layer is black and
outside the layer is also black, I'm simply
| | 00:26 |
extending the Alpha Channel
beyond the original source.
| | 00:30 |
And if the layer you are using is
an interesting image, outside of that
| | 00:33 |
Alpha Channel might look quite strange, and
we covered why that is in an earlier movie.
| | 00:40 |
Now we need to finish off this effect so
that the stroke wipes on the original layer.
| | 00:45 |
I have the Composition panel on the left.
| | 00:48 |
I will set it to 100% so you can
see what's going on more clearly.
| | 00:51 |
I still have my Project panel.
| | 00:55 |
I'll just tidy up my workspace. I will
select the layer and then select either F3
| | 01:00 |
or open Effect>Effect Controls.
| | 01:04 |
And you will see that paint is
an effect with just one parameter;
| | 01:07 |
Paint on Transparent.
| | 01:09 |
You will also notice that it does
appear in the timeline, if you twirl up Paint
| | 01:14 |
and twirl it back down again.
| | 01:17 |
But when you press U to see your
keyframes, it doesn't show you that
| | 01:20 |
option automatically.
| | 01:22 |
So either in the timeline or in the
Effect Controls panel, we need to turn on
| | 01:27 |
Paint on Transparent.
| | 01:28 |
We will turn that on and now at the
beginning of the comp, the layer will be transparent.
| | 01:34 |
Again, my image is black and by
extending the Alpha Channel, I am simply
| | 01:40 |
extending the black pixels.
| | 01:42 |
If you have a colorful image, you'll see the
image wipe on, but the edge will not be clean.
| | 01:48 |
So next, we need to apply an
effect after the paint stroke that will
| | 01:52 |
retrieve the original Alpha Channel
from the source and then apply it on top
| | 01:58 |
of the blobby strokes.
| | 02:00 |
The effect we are looking for is Effect>
Channel>Set Matte, and that applies to
| | 02:07 |
Set Matte effect after the Paint effect.
| | 02:10 |
The defaults are actually just fine.
| | 02:12 |
What the Set Matte effect will do is
take a matte from a layer and the default
| | 02:18 |
is to use the layer it's currently applied to.
| | 02:21 |
The next parameter asks which
channel should I use for a matte.
| | 02:25 |
Again, the default of Alpha Channel is correct.
| | 02:28 |
And by the way, the Set Matte
effect is a very old effect.
| | 02:33 |
But once the Track Matte feature was
added to After Effects, the Set Matte
| | 02:37 |
effect became less useful, but it is
a way to use a matte from a different
| | 02:41 |
layer if you need to.
| | 02:42 |
You will notice in the Layer panel,
it's also cleaned up the edges.
| | 02:47 |
So now the layer wipes on
in the Alpha Channel as well.
| | 02:51 |
Remember, in the View pop-up, you have a
choice to see the Paint effect and that
| | 02:56 |
shows you the paint before
the Set Matte has been applied.
| | 03:00 |
To see it after Set Matte, you will
need to make sure Set Matte is enabled and
| | 03:05 |
to divide as a View pop-up, you
will also see the Render checkbox.
| | 03:09 |
You want to make sure this is enabled as well.
| | 03:12 |
Otherwise, the effect is not actually
rendered and all you see is the original image.
| | 03:17 |
Now, if you would like to practice
this technique with any other layers, I
| | 03:20 |
will turn off the solo button and remind
you that there are other layers in this comp.
| | 03:25 |
We'll resize it with the triangle,
notice if you start revealing from the center
| | 03:33 |
and then move along this line,
the line eventually gets thicker.
| | 03:37 |
So if you are not using a pressure
sensitive tablet, you may need to animate the
| | 03:42 |
diameter of the stroke.
| | 03:44 |
That way you can create a small
stroke in the middle and then increase the
| | 03:48 |
diameter when the area you are
trying to reveal becomes larger.
| | 03:53 |
If you have the exercise files, go ahead
and preview the final composition again.
| | 03:57 |
That might give you a few more ideas.
| | 04:11 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. The Clone Stamp ToolAn introduction to cloning| 00:07 |
If you're familiar with cloning in
Photoshop, the Clone Stamp tool in After
| | 00:11 |
Effects works in a similar fashion.
| | 00:13 |
It samples pixels from one part of a
layer and copies them to another part.
| | 00:18 |
If you are still following along,
I have closed the Compositions from
| | 00:21 |
the previous movie.
| | 00:23 |
If you have the project file,
open Composition 03-Cloning*starter.
| | 00:26 |
We have two layers in this composition.
| | 00:31 |
The first layer, miscellaneous splats,
is just a series of marks we made with
| | 00:36 |
India ink and then we
scanned it in and applied the tint.
| | 00:40 |
The second layer is a
series of watercolor images.
| | 00:45 |
If I turn off Frame Blending, you can
see that it's a series of images that have
| | 00:50 |
been sequenced together.
| | 00:52 |
These are sections caught from a larger image.
| | 00:56 |
When Frame Blending is enabled and
you RAM preview, you can see the images
| | 01:00 |
are blended together.
| | 01:02 |
This is an inexpensive way of
making interesting backgrounds.
| | 01:06 |
To practice using the Clone Stamp tool,
we will concentrate on layer number 1.
| | 01:10 |
So let's double-click it to
open it in the Layer panel.
| | 01:14 |
Just like with the Paint and Eraser tools,
all cloning is done in the Layer panel.
| | 01:19 |
We will use the Clone Stamp tool to
add some more ink splats to this image.
| | 01:24 |
Select the Clone Stamp tool and that
will automatically open the Paint and
| | 01:28 |
Brushes panels if they are not already open.
| | 01:31 |
You should be pretty familiar with
these panels by now so I want you to focus
| | 01:35 |
mostly on the Clone Options.
| | 01:37 |
The Paint and Brushes panels will be
set to whatever values you use the last
| | 01:41 |
time you use this tool.
| | 01:42 |
So I will check that Opacity is at 100
%, mode is set to Normal, Channels is set
| | 01:49 |
to RGB Alpha, and Duration is set to Constant.
| | 01:52 |
Note that you don't need the
foreground and background colors when you
| | 01:55 |
are cloning.
| | 02:07 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The cloning process explained| 00:07 |
Before we cover all these various
clone options, let's just review how
| | 00:11 |
cloning basically works.
| | 00:13 |
Just like in Photoshop, you find
an object that you want to clone.
| | 00:17 |
I press the Option key on Mac, Alt key on
Windows, and click to set the origin point.
| | 00:23 |
If this is the first time I've
clicked in the Layer panel, I may be just
| | 00:26 |
bringing the panel forward.
| | 00:28 |
So let's click again just to make
sure I am setting the origin point.
| | 00:32 |
When I release the Option or Alt key
and move to another area of the layer
| | 00:36 |
panel, when I start painting,
I will clone that element.
| | 00:39 |
But if I want to repeat elements, I
just Option+click on them and repeat that.
| | 00:44 |
Now since I didn't spend any time
setting the size of my brush, if I pick a
| | 00:51 |
large element, I will have to do a
little work to duplicate that item.
| | 00:55 |
With my layer selected, I will press
the shortcut to reveal the paint strokes
| | 01:00 |
and that's two Ps in quick succession.
| | 01:03 |
Each stroke I've painted
appears in the Timeline.
| | 01:07 |
When I select Clone stroke 4, I can
see in the Layer panel, how my stroke
| | 01:11 |
was actually drawn.
| | 01:12 |
So I can delete that stroke, or I can
click on Paint, press Delete and that will
| | 01:18 |
delete all the strokes I have created so far.
| | 01:20 |
So let's start again.
| | 01:22 |
If I make my brush large enough to
include that entire image, I can simply
| | 01:27 |
Option+click to set the origin point
and then with one click, I can repeat that
| | 01:32 |
element and that can be very handy,
but remember I am also including a lot of
| | 01:37 |
the background when I do that.
| | 01:38 |
In this case, I have a simple white background.
| | 01:42 |
So while this technique might be handy,
if I was repeating let's say stars in a
| | 01:46 |
black sky where I don't mind how much
background I pick up, having a large brush
| | 01:51 |
may not work for every case.
| | 01:53 |
Let's say I was repeating a bird in the sky.
| | 01:57 |
I might not want to just Option+
click this bird and repeat it, because I
| | 02:01 |
would be including a lot of the
background when I clone and if you ever look
| | 02:05 |
at an image of the sky, it's likely
that there's a gradient involved, it goes
| | 02:10 |
from dark to light say.
| | 02:12 |
Or it changes color.
| | 02:13 |
So let's zoom in on this bird here and
let's say I wanted to actually clone this bird.
| | 02:18 |
I probably want to make a very small stroke.
| | 02:21 |
I can Option+click to set my origin
point, but I will also turn on this very
| | 02:25 |
handy feature called Clone Source Overlay.
| | 02:28 |
When this is enabled and I go to Paint,
I will see a ghost image of what I am
| | 02:32 |
about to clone and because I have my
Options set to Aligned, I can start and
| | 02:38 |
stop and it will keep the same Offset.
| | 02:41 |
As soon as I click with my mouse,
it will lock in that Offset.
| | 02:45 |
At the moment, I am only offsetting
in the horizontal axis, I am not
| | 02:49 |
offsetting vertically.
| | 02:50 |
It wouldn't really matter how much of
the background I picked up because it's
| | 02:54 |
likely the sky would be the same if I
just moved to the left or the right.
| | 02:59 |
But let's say I wanted to
clone higher or lower in the sky.
| | 03:03 |
In that case, I would want to select the
bird I want to copy, and get a very small brush.
| | 03:08 |
Let's say I get enough just to make
the body for now and then I could make it
| | 03:13 |
even smaller to get some of the
elements and notice that because I have my
| | 03:18 |
Options set to Aligned, I can stop
and start as many times as I like.
| | 03:23 |
However, I am making multiple strokes.
| | 03:26 |
I think you get the idea.
| | 03:30 |
Remember, if you do make a mistake and
you pick up some of the background and
| | 03:33 |
you can see the difference, you can press
Command+Shift to erase in Last Stroke Only mode.
| | 03:39 |
Of course, you want to set the size
of the eraser to match the size of
| | 03:42 |
your cloning brush.
| | 03:43 |
And we'll go back to get up to 100% and let's
select the Paint effect again and delete it.
| | 03:51 |
So let's talk a little bit more
about Aligned and Clone Source Overlay.
| | 03:57 |
Let's make my brush a little bigger.
| | 03:59 |
Let the Clone Source Overlay as active.
| | 04:02 |
As I move around the Comp, I can
see exactly what I would be cloning.
| | 04:07 |
I can see the original image and
I can also see an offset of that.
| | 04:11 |
However, I find because Clone Source
Overlay is set to 50%, it's sometimes hard
| | 04:17 |
to tell which are the original
objects and which ones I would be cloning.
| | 04:21 |
So I like to set this down to a
much lower value, somewhere around 15%.
| | 04:26 |
Now I can tell that this is the
overlay and this is the original image.
| | 04:31 |
So as I move around, I
might decide to clone up here.
| | 04:34 |
If I want to reset the offset, I just
Option+click again and then wherever I
| | 04:39 |
first start to click,
that will be the new offset.
| | 04:43 |
If you're familiar with cloning in
Photoshop, you know there are two methods of
| | 04:47 |
repeating the sampled area;
| | 04:49 |
Aligned, where the first stroke you make,
determines the offset for subsequent
| | 04:53 |
strokes and Not Aligned where every
stroke starts from the same origin point.
| | 04:58 |
Sometimes, I prefer to
work with Aligned turned off.
| | 05:02 |
When I disable that, instead of an
Offset, you see a value for Source Position.
| | 05:07 |
So if I Option+click on this mark here,
that will update the Source Position.
| | 05:13 |
Now wherever I move, it's like that
little mark is stuck to my cursor.
| | 05:17 |
So I can place one here, place
another here and another here and so on.
| | 05:22 |
So depending on what you're doing, you
will need to make a decision of whether
| | 05:26 |
your cloning is aligned or not aligned.
| | 05:30 |
If you ever need to reset the Source
Position, you can just click it and you
| | 05:35 |
could also scrub these values.
| | 05:36 |
As you scrub the values, you'll see
it appear as an overlay and that also
| | 05:42 |
applies when you're in Aligned mode.
| | 05:44 |
You can zero out the values, then
scrub the Offset parameter or you also
| | 05:49 |
see an overlay of the image.
| | 05:53 |
In the next movie, I will show
you how the Clone Presets work.
| | 06:07 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using clone presets| 00:07 |
I created a number of Clone
strokes in the previous movie.
| | 00:11 |
I will select the Paint Effect,
press Delete and that will get us back to
| | 00:15 |
the original image.
| | 00:17 |
In the previous movie, I was
only using Clone Preset number 1.
| | 00:21 |
There are actually five
Clone presets to choose from.
| | 00:25 |
The preset remembers all the values you
have for the source layer that you are
| | 00:29 |
cloning from, whether the clone stroke
is Aligned or not aligned, whether you
| | 00:34 |
lock the Source Time, and I will cover
that later, as well as the Offset and
| | 00:38 |
the Source Time Shift.
| | 00:41 |
The presets don't remember the options you
have set with the top part of the Paint panel.
| | 00:46 |
So these settings will apply to every preset.
| | 00:49 |
Also note that the value you set for the
Clone Source Overlay will also apply to
| | 00:54 |
each of the presets.
| | 00:55 |
Now what can you use presets for?
| | 00:58 |
Well, let's say I would like
to clone some of these items.
| | 01:01 |
Let's say there are stars or birds in the
sky and so on, and I would like to have
| | 01:05 |
a preset for each object.
| | 01:07 |
I will turn off the switch for Aligned.
| | 01:09 |
That way, when I Option+click to set the
origin of an object, and let's make my
| | 01:15 |
brush a little larger.
| | 01:16 |
All I need to do now is click once,
twice to repeat that particular element.
| | 01:23 |
I might like more of these later on.
| | 01:25 |
So I am going to leave preset number 1
saved with those settings, and I will go
| | 01:30 |
on to preset number 2.
| | 01:32 |
With this preset, I will also
turn off the Aligned switch.
| | 01:36 |
Now I can Option+click on another
element and add some of those around the frame.
| | 01:41 |
As you are working, if you get annoyed
by the overlay always being attached to
| | 01:46 |
the cursor, let me show you a shortcut.
| | 01:49 |
If I disable Clone Source Overlay, now
as I move around the Layer panel, I no
| | 01:54 |
longer see the overlay.
| | 01:55 |
But if I press Option+Shift on Mac or
Alt+Shift on Windows, it will pop up
| | 02:01 |
underneath the cursor.
| | 02:02 |
So this is a nice way to work.
| | 02:05 |
I find it's a little annoying to
always have the overlay visible.
| | 02:08 |
So I am going to use that shortcut from now on.
| | 02:11 |
So I now have two presets programmed.
| | 02:14 |
FOr my third preset, I
will also turn off Aligned.
| | 02:17 |
Let's pick another element,
let's say, this little guy here.
| | 02:24 |
At this point, I can simply use the
shortcuts number 3, 4, and 5 on the regular
| | 02:30 |
keyboard to cycle between presets 1, 2, and 3.
| | 02:34 |
So when I press 3, I will get this shape,
pressing 4 gives me this second preset
| | 02:42 |
and 5 gives me the third preset.
| | 02:44 |
So the presets can be very handy when you
want to recall settings that you used earlier.
| | 02:51 |
In the next movie, we will cover
animating the stroke as well as the
| | 02:54 |
rendering order.
| | 03:07 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Editing and animating clone strokes| 00:07 |
In the last movie, I made a bit of a mess.
| | 00:11 |
I think I will simplify it by deleting
the Paint Effect, as I show you how to
| | 00:15 |
edit and animate a Clone stroke.
| | 00:17 |
I will return to preset number 1 which
used this element as an origin point, and
| | 00:22 |
I will create a clone.
| | 00:23 |
I will press PP and that will
twirl down Paint in the timeline.
| | 00:28 |
And here is Clone stroke 1.
| | 00:31 |
The Clone stokes are very
similar to the brushstrokes.
| | 00:34 |
They have a Path property,
Stroke Options, and Transformations.
| | 00:39 |
When you select a Clone stroke, you will
see its anchor point in the Layer panel.
| | 00:44 |
If I press V to return to the
Selection tool, I can drag the Clone stroke
| | 00:48 |
around and reposition it.
| | 00:50 |
You will also find the position value
on the Transform, and you can scrub that
| | 00:56 |
value in the timeline.
| | 00:59 |
Don't confuse the position of the
Clone stroke with the position that appears
| | 01:03 |
on the Stroke Options.
| | 01:06 |
Here we have Clone Source and Clone Position.
| | 01:10 |
Scrubbing Clone Position changes
the area that you're cloning from.
| | 01:15 |
The other parameters in the
Transformations like Anchor Point, Position, Scale,
| | 01:20 |
and Rotation should be pretty familiar.
| | 01:22 |
For instance, you can rotate
the element that you've cloned.
| | 01:27 |
In fact, let's just set
up a couple of keyframes.
| | 01:29 |
I am going to rotate this, say, three times.
| | 01:33 |
Now I would like my Layer panel to RAM preview.
| | 01:37 |
So I am going to turn on the
Always Preview this View switch.
| | 01:41 |
Now when I RAM preview, the
Layer panel will play back.
| | 01:44 |
Of course, I can also scrub
the timeline in the Layer panel.
| | 01:53 |
If you change the value for the Anchor
Point, the element will now rotate around
| | 01:58 |
the new Anchor Point.
| | 01:59 |
So nothing too surprising there;
| | 02:03 |
let's return that to 0 and of course,
you can scale it so the Clone stroke is a
| | 02:08 |
little different from the original.
| | 02:10 |
All of the other options are very
similar to what we saw over the brushstroke.
| | 02:14 |
Now let's consider the
rendering order for a Clone stroke.
| | 02:17 |
I will return to the Clone Stamp tool,
make sure I press F2 so I don't replace
| | 02:23 |
my first Clone stroke.
| | 02:25 |
I'll create another one of these elements.
| | 02:27 |
Right up here, I'm still on preset number 1.
| | 02:30 |
Let's say I would like to
erase the original element.
| | 02:33 |
That way I can just have a
Clone stroke that I can animate.
| | 02:36 |
I'll select the Eraser tool
and let's check the settings.
| | 02:40 |
I don't want to create transparency.
| | 02:42 |
So I will first set the Channels to RGB only.
| | 02:46 |
If I erase now, I'll end up
with a black background color.
| | 02:50 |
So I will click the black-and-white
switch that makes the Background Color white.
| | 02:54 |
I also don't want to erase the Last Stroke.
| | 02:57 |
So I will select the layer Source & Paint.
| | 03:00 |
The Duration of Constant should work.
| | 03:03 |
Make sure I am back at time 0, press
the Command key to resize my brush,
| | 03:08 |
increase the Hardness value as we don't
need the soft edge, and now I can delete
| | 03:13 |
the element with just one click.
| | 03:16 |
Now you see I have Eraser 1 in the timeline.
| | 03:19 |
It's very important that Eraser 1
is rendering after my Clone strokes.
| | 03:25 |
Notice if I drag Eraser 1 down the
timeline, it now renders after Clone 1, but
| | 03:31 |
the second Clone stroke I created
at the top-left is no longer visible.
| | 03:35 |
That's because Eraser 1 is removing the
element before the second Clone stroke
| | 03:40 |
is able to do its job.
| | 03:42 |
So do keep an eye on the rendering order.
| | 03:44 |
Of course, once I have removed the
element, I can't now move this element down
| | 03:49 |
into the original position.
| | 03:51 |
If I try to do that, let's select Clone 2.
| | 03:53 |
We will change back to the Selection tool.
| | 03:57 |
You will notice now it's just moving
that element behind the Eraser stroke
| | 04:02 |
because the Eraser stroke is rendering last.
| | 04:05 |
Before we go, let's take a
look at the final composition.
| | 04:09 |
I will RAM preview.
| | 04:12 |
This style of cloning might be handy
when you are adding more stars to the sky
| | 04:16 |
and of course, it works on video layers as well.
| | 04:19 |
You can even offset the frame it's cloning
from, using the Source Time Shift feature.
| | 04:24 |
However, it's often the case that if you
are cloning a large object, it might be
| | 04:28 |
easier to just duplicate the layer and
then use the masking tool to isolate the
| | 04:33 |
object you're trying to clone.
| | 04:35 |
Once the object is on a separate layer,
you will have more control when you want
| | 04:39 |
to animate it or apply
effects in blending modes.
| | 04:43 |
In the next movie, I will cover
some options for shifting time.
| | 04:58 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Time-shifting clone strokes| 00:07 |
In this movie, I'll cover some
of the options for shifting time.
| | 00:11 |
I already have one of my Clone strokes
animating, and that's Clone Stroke 1.
| | 00:17 |
I will remove Clone 2 and the
Eraser stroke just to simplify matters.
| | 00:22 |
If you don't have a Clone stroke
that's animating, make sure your source is a
| | 00:26 |
movie or an animated element.
| | 00:28 |
I will start by selecting the Clone
Stamp tool, and just so we can save our
| | 00:33 |
other presets, I will move
ahead to preset number 4.
| | 00:37 |
Notice that I can Option+click on the
animated element and I can clone it elsewhere.
| | 00:45 |
Now as I scrub the timeline, both the
elements animate in exactly the same way.
| | 00:50 |
So yes, you can clone the clone.
| | 00:52 |
Now you might not like the fact
that the clone strokes are in sync, so
| | 00:57 |
let's look at Clone 2.
| | 00:58 |
We will twirl down Stroke Options and we
will look at the option for Clone Time Shift.
| | 01:05 |
This allows me to shift the time so
it's not showing me exactly the same image.
| | 01:13 |
Let's try another option.
| | 01:15 |
Notice that Clone 2 is selected.
| | 01:17 |
I will press F2 to deselect.
| | 01:20 |
If I leave it selected, when I go to
clone another stroke, I will replace this
| | 01:24 |
stroke that's selected, just like
we saw with the Brush tool earlier.
| | 01:27 |
So let's say I like to
Clone my animated stroke again.
| | 01:31 |
First, I will turn off the Aligned option.
| | 01:35 |
That way when I Option+click, I
will always be using this element.
| | 01:39 |
You will notice right below the Source
Position, is an option for Source Time Shift.
| | 01:44 |
So if I know in advance, that I don't
wanted to be in sync, I can change this value.
| | 01:49 |
Now when I go to add another clone
stroke, I will press Option+Shift so I can
| | 01:55 |
see the frame I'm going to get.
| | 01:57 |
The first time you click, they will
bring forward the Layer panel, and then
| | 02:01 |
click to get the Clone stroke.
| | 02:02 |
You can see that I'm using a
different frame from the origin.
| | 02:07 |
Also notice that changing this after
the fact won't update the existing stroke.
| | 02:12 |
But there is no reason why I can't twirl
down Clone 3, twirl down Stroke Options
| | 02:18 |
and then continue to shift it in time.
| | 02:22 |
So let's look at one more option.
| | 02:24 |
Again, I will press F2 to deselect that
stroke, and let's clone that stroke again.
| | 02:31 |
Lock Source Time is not
enabled, it says Source Time Shift.
| | 02:36 |
When you enable Lock Source Time,
notice that it now says Source Time is 0.
| | 02:41 |
So this is an absolute frame.
| | 02:44 |
It's not an offset.
| | 02:46 |
It also means that even though this element I
am cloning is animating. When I make a copy,
| | 02:51 |
that copy will not animate,
because I'm cloning only Source Time 0.
| | 02:57 |
Again, it doesn't mean that if I don't
like that frame, I can't update the frame
| | 03:02 |
it's cloning from using Clone Time.
| | 03:04 |
But I will still only have one frame,
unless, of course, I animate the
| | 03:09 |
Clone Time parameter.
| | 03:11 |
Finally, I will point out that even
though you can change the clone time after
| | 03:16 |
the fact in the timeline, you cannot change
whether or not the Lock Source Time is enabled.
| | 03:21 |
So if you want to clone from a
single point in time, make sure you enable
| | 03:26 |
Lock Source Time before you clone,
because you can't turn it on later in the
| | 03:31 |
timeline.
| | 03:43 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Roto Brush Quick StartBasic Roto Brush setup| 00:07 | For the next several movies I'd like
to show you how to use the Roto Brush tool,
| | 00:11 | which was introduced in After Effects CS5.
| | 00:14 | Roto Brush is a very special paintbrush
that looks for the edges of objects
| | 00:20 | in a layer and separates these elements
from each other by creating an alpha channel
| | 00:24 | that basically separates a foreground object
on the background around it.
| | 00:27 | If you have access to the Exercise Files,
first open Roto Brush 1 Butterfly starter
| | 00:32 | (RB1-Butterfly*starter).
| | 00:33 | This is a really simple application of
Roto Brush and I want to start with
| | 00:38 | just to show you some basic concepts.
| | 00:41 | In the scene I have some footage of tulips
in the background and a little animation
| | 00:45 | of a butterfly flying across
the scene in the foreground
| | 00:48 | that we created in the earlier
After Effects Apprentice video lesson.
| | 00:51 | I'll render up a quick RAM preview here,
and you'll see that our butterfly
| | 00:56 | wafts in front of the flowers.
| | 00:57 | Well, that's kind of nice.
| | 01:00 | But to be honest, I think it will
look more realistic if a butterfly
| | 01:04 | wasn't flying basically
below the level of the flowers.
| | 01:06 | You'd expect the butterfly to be above them
and therefore it should fly
| | 01:12 | behind these foreground tulips.
| | 01:13 | I could just duplicate the tulip player
and mask it out and put that copy
| | 01:18 | on top to obscure the butterfly, but these
tulips are shaking a little bit in the wind.
| | 01:22 | So that means I would have to animate
this mask and probably update it
| | 01:26 | every single frame.
| | 01:27 | That would be a lot of work.
| | 01:29 | Well, this is where Roto Brush
can help us save you some time.
| | 01:32 | It's not an automatic click-and-you're-done
sort of thing, but it can reduce
| | 01:38 | the amount of labor required
to pull off a composite like this.
| | 01:41 | First thing I'm going to do is
duplicate my Tulips layer.
| | 01:44 | I need to have a copy of it in front of
my butterfly to block out or obscure
| | 01:50 | the butterfly as it goes past.
| | 01:51 | Secondly, I'm going to see what frames
the butterfly touches the tulips.
| | 01:57 | There's no point in doing
more work than necessary.
| | 02:00 | So I'm going to trim down this duplicate layer
to only include the frames we need.
| | 02:04 | I'm going to hold Option on Mac, Alt on Windows,
press the left square bracket (
| | 02:16 | [) to set the in-point for this layer. Then move to where the butterfly is a little bit later. I did some in
front of the second tulip as well and it clears it about there. Hold Option or Alt, press right square bracket (]
| | 02:17 | ) and set the outpoint for the layer.
| | 02:25 | Now when I drag that Tulip player on top,
it just covers the area where
| | 02:31 | the butterfly crosses the tulips in question.
| | 02:35 | There's a couple of more set up things
you need to do to use Roto Brush.
| | 02:39 | One, you must be at full resolution.
| | 02:42 | You really need to calculate every pixel
to get an accurate idea
| | 02:46 | of what Roto Brush is up to.
| | 02:48 | It's also a good idea to be at 100%
magnification at the same time.
| | 02:51 | So I'm going to lock that in.
| | 02:53 | Next, just like with the Paint tool
work with the Rotor Brush needs
| | 02:57 | to be performed in the Layer panel.
| | 02:58 | So I'm going to double-click this duplicated
layer to open it in the Layer panel.
| | 03:03 | And here is my trimmed segment
that I want to use Roto Brush on.
| | 03:07 | Now that we've done this prep work,
in the next movie we can actually start
| | 03:11 | using the Roto Brush tool.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a matte| 00:07 | Now the first step to using Roto Brush
is to choose a frame where you can see
| | 00:11 | the entire object that you need to cut out,
or failing that, as much of it as possible.
| | 00:16 | In this case these tulips don't move that much
and they're always fully in the frame.
| | 00:21 | So what frame I use for my starting point
is not all of that important.
| | 00:24 | But the frame you choose is
what's going to be called a Base Frame.
| | 00:28 | Roto Brush is going to take the information
you create on that frame
| | 00:32 | and propagate that information
earlier and later in time.
| | 00:35 | We'll just go to one second
even now just for fun.
| | 00:39 | Next, you need to select the Roto Brush tool.
| | 00:42 | It's this large brush
painting out this little man.
| | 00:45 | I'll select the tool and as I move over
the Layer panel, you'll see I have
| | 00:49 | a circle that indicates the size of our brush.
| | 00:51 | It's also green in color with a plus sign
in the middle, which indicates
| | 00:55 | I'm going to add to my alpha channel.
| | 00:57 | I'm going to be working on
my foreground not my background.
| | 01:01 | You can resize the Roto Brush,
just as you would your Paint Brush, by holding
| | 01:05 | Command on Mac or Ctrl on windows,
then dragging.
| | 01:07 | Unlike a normal painting where you might
want to create a small brush to get
| | 01:12 | the detail around the edges of this flower,
Roto Brush works a little bit better
| | 01:16 | if you make large strokes because
it's going to be looking at the colors
| | 01:19 | that you drag your stroke over.
| | 01:20 | So I'm actually going to make a fairly
large brush here to take in a lot of these petals
| | 01:25 | with a minimum amount of work.
| | 01:27 | Once I've done that I'll click and drag
through these petals that I want
| | 01:32 | to be included in my Roto Brush.
| | 01:33 | Don't go outside and don't cross over
to the background,
| | 01:36 | you'll get a false reading then.
I'm going to Undo.
| | 01:39 | Instead, just paint right through these petals.
| | 01:41 | After Effects will draw a pink segmentation
boundary around the area that
| | 01:48 | it found from our colors that we stroked
in searching outwards until it found a transition.
| | 01:54 | The area inside that propagation boundary is the
foreground, the area outside is the background.
| | 02:01 | You can add multiple areas
to your foreground selection.
| | 02:04 | For example, the butterfly flew behind this
petal as well, or at least we want it to.
| | 02:10 | So I'll click and drag through
those petals and they will get
| | 02:13 | a pink segmentation boundary as well.
| | 02:15 | Down here in the Layer panel's timeline
you'll see a little gold bar.
| | 02:19 | The gold bar indicates the Base Frame
that you created where
| | 02:25 | you first drew these strokes.
| | 02:26 | You'll also see this gray bar with arrows
pointing to the right and to the left.
| | 02:31 | As you can see from the tooltip,
this is called the Roto Brush Span.
| | 02:35 | Roto Brush is going to take the information
from the Base Frame and propagate it
| | 02:39 | on successive frames earlier and later in time.
| | 02:43 | It will look for any movements from
frame to frame and build upon that information
| | 02:47 | as it gets further way from your Base Frame.
| | 02:49 | You can use Page Up or Page Down,
or as you did with the Paint tool, you can
| | 02:54 | use the 1 and 2 keys on the normal portion
of your keyboard to step forward frames
| | 02:59 | or to step backward frames.
| | 03:00 | You'll see the pink segmentation boundary
is updating to take in to account
| | 03:05 | these petals being blown around in the wind.
| | 03:07 | If I'll just randomly jump to a frame
later in time, there'll be
| | 03:11 | some calculation time involved as Roto Brush
propagates out to that frame.
| | 03:16 | Roto Brush also has a number of tools
that allows you to see the result
| | 03:20 | of you creating your segmentation boundary,
even including a masked overlay
| | 03:25 | like you may be used to seeing in Photoshop.
| | 03:27 | I'll go back to my segmentation
boundary for now.
| | 03:30 | Okay. Let's see how this looks.
| | 03:32 | I'm going to bring my Comp panel forward
and I see the butterfly is indeed
| | 03:35 | behind my flower petals. Cool!
| | 03:37 | I'm going to press 0 on numeric keypad
to cue up RAM preview.
| | 03:41 | Roto Brush does take a while to calculate,
because it has to do
| | 03:44 | all that propagation work. So far, so good.
| | 03:47 | Butterfly spans the petals, and the butterfly
disappears for part of the flight.
| | 03:52 | Well, what's going on there?
| | 03:54 | Let's go to where it disappeared
and go back into our Layer panel.
| | 03:59 | You'll notice that the time marker
is beyond my Roto Brush Span.
| | 04:04 | After Effects only assume it's good
for so many frames, 20 to be precise,
| | 04:09 | before it says, you know, I really would
like to have some more information before
| | 04:12 | I continue to use this old base
frame to go this many frames away.
| | 04:17 | If Roto Brush was having difficulty,
you can train it to keep up with changes
| | 04:21 | in your footage, and that's going to be
covered in-depth in the next chapter.
| | 04:24 | But in this case, the Roto Brush was
working just fine up until the point
| | 04:28 | we ran beyond the end of our span,
and now you'll see the pink outline
| | 04:33 | has enclosed the entire frame, you can
go ahead and just drag out the span longer.
| | 04:40 | I'll jump here later in time.
| | 04:41 | It'll take a few moments for it to propagate,
and looks like it's still properly
| | 04:47 | enclosing these tulips. No problem.
| | 04:50 | I'll go back to my Comp panel, RAM preview,
and now my butterfly stays in the picture
| | 04:56 | during the span of when we have
our Roto Brushed copy the layer in front.
| | 05:02 | That's looking pretty good.
| | 05:05 | But there's one other little issue here.
| | 05:07 | You might have noticed when the butterfly
is behind the tulip petals,
| | 05:13 | there's a little bit of a black line.
| | 05:15 | Compositors often refer to this as a matte line
and they're considered to be undesirable.
| | 05:19 | You want those edges to blur together.
| | 05:21 | I'm going to zoom in a little bit here,
hold the Spacebar and pan down.
| | 05:25 | You can see a little bit of that
black fringing here where the
| | 05:28 | alpha channel is not quite perfect.
| | 05:31 | And a little bit in to here.
| | 05:33 | Roto Brush has an entire section
to refine the matte that it has created.
| | 05:39 | You just need to turn it on.
| | 05:41 | It slows things down.
That's why it defaults to being off.
| | 05:44 | But when you're at this stage,
you now want a refined matte.
| | 05:47 | And you'll notice some of the black fringing
went away. Before and after.
| | 05:52 | By doing so it decontaminates
any color that bled into those nice
| | 05:55 | anti-aliased edges.
| | 05:57 | It calculates motion blur
for any movement in the mask outline.
| | 05:59 | It's a very powerful section
of the Roto Brush effect.
| | 06:03 | You can even choke it a little bit more
to get rid of more of those
| | 06:08 | matte lines if you want to.
| | 06:09 | So final step, I'm going to press T to reveal
the opacity of my tulip in front.
| | 06:14 | These tulip petals look like they are
semi-translucent, so I'm going to back off
| | 06:18 | the opacity of this copy in front
until I just barely see the butterfly
| | 06:25 | through that copy of the tulip.
| | 06:27 | Press Shift+/ to recenter my view, RAM preview,
and again, it takes some time
| | 06:37 | to calculate, particularly propagating
the additional Roto Brush stroke information.
| | 06:45 | But in the end I have a very nice composite
and now my butterfly appears
| | 06:50 | to be flying above the tulips even though
the tulips are on their own plane.
| | 06:54 | Now this was a particularly easy
use of Roto Brush, trust me.
| | 07:01 | Almost never will it be this easy
to use Roto Brush in real-life.
| | 07:06 | Therefore, in the next chapter we're going
to tackle a much more difficult
| | 07:10 | real-world example of cutting out
a person's arms as they move in front
| | 07:14 | of the computer screen.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Screen Replacement Using the Roto BrushThe Roto Brush workflow| 00:07 | Now again, I want to be completely
honest with you.
| | 00:10 | That previous Roto Brush example
was deceptively simple.
| | 00:14 | Very, very few shots will ever work out
that well with that a small amount of work.
| | 00:19 | The problem is many After Effects users
who want to use Roto Brush don't bother learning
| | 00:23 | the correct way to use it,
expect they can do that small amount of work,
| | 00:27 | and expect those good results.
| | 00:28 | Well, they're sorely disappointed
and they walk away convinced Roto Brush
| | 00:31 | doesn't work.
| | 00:32 | The reality is, Roto Brush does require
a lot of work on your part and it works
| | 00:37 | much better if you follow
a very specific workflow.
| | 00:40 | And that's what we're going to be covering
in the next several movies.
| | 00:44 | The steps that workflow include:
| | 00:46 | identifying the foreground that you
wish to separate from the background,
| | 00:49 | choosing a representative Base Frame
with a maximum amount of foreground
| | 00:53 | information visible, defining the Base Frame
using a collection of foreground
| | 00:57 | and background Roto Brush strokes,
moving a few frames away from that base
| | 01:02 | and tweaking the Roto Brush's Propagation
parameters to optimize how Roto Brush
| | 01:06 | tracks changes in the shot, returning
to the Base Frame and then moving away
| | 01:10 | from it one frame at a time adding corrective
foreground-background strokes as needed,
| | 01:14 | and finally tweaking the Matte parameters
to refine the resulting alpha channel.
| | 01:20 | I've switched back to After Effects CS5.5. --
Roto Brush works in 5, 5.5, 6 or later --
| | 01:25 | and I'm going to close my previous example.
| | 01:29 | And if you have access to the Exercise Files
that came with this lesson, open up
| | 01:33 | Roto Brush 2 Screen Replacement starter
(RB2-Screen Replacement*starter).
| | 01:36 | We've already done a lot of prep work
for you in this shot.
| | 01:39 | The original footage showed an actor
sitting in front of a laptop
| | 01:44 | with a fairly boring display.
| | 01:46 | Note that the actor's hands
are also in front of that screen.
| | 01:50 | What we would prefer to do is put a brand new,
far sexier screen on the face of that laptop.
| | 01:55 | I've already tracked this for you using Mocha,
which was discussed in a previous lesson,
| | 01:59 | and also did a little bit of blurring
to make sure it matched
| | 02:03 | the camera's depth of field blur
that naturally existed in the scene.
| | 02:06 | The next thing we need to do is cut out
a copy of the actor's hands and arms
| | 02:11 | using Roto Brush and put that copy in
front of our new screen,
| | 02:16 | that way it looks like it was behind his hands
when the shot was originally taken.
| | 02:19 | So with that in mind, in the next movie
we're going to set up our project
| | 02:23 | and go about identifying a good
Base Frame to start our Roto Brush work.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing a base frame| 00:07 | Since we want a copy of this actor
to appear in front of our new screen,
| | 00:13 | we're going to need to duplicate this background
footage so that we have a nice little
| | 00:17 | rotoed out snippet that we could put in front.
| | 00:20 | So I will select the Laptop.mov layer,
Cmd+D or Ctrl+D to duplicate it.
| | 00:24 | With it selected, press Return and rename it
Actor Roto>Enter and drag it
| | 00:32 | in front of my new Control Panel layer.
| | 00:35 | Next, I need to double-click this layer
to open it up in the Layer panel;
| | 00:40 | all Roto Brush work takes place
in the Layer panel.
| | 00:45 | The other set of details that are important
is you should be working
| | 00:49 | at 100% magnification or larger,
and I'll show you that in a second,
| | 00:53 | and also you should definitely
be at full resolution.
| | 00:55 | So once I've verified those settings,
I'll go back to my Layer panel and start
| | 01:00 | looking at this actor's movements to
determine what might make a good Base Frame.
| | 01:05 | I'm looking for places with a maximum
amount of the actor is exposed,
| | 01:12 | and some compromises may be required.
| | 01:14 | For example, this frame nicely shows
both his little finger extended and also
| | 01:19 | these gaps between his fingers that's a
good starting point, but his other hand,
| | 01:24 | his left hand, is somewhat closed.
| | 01:26 | I need to go a little bit later in time
to get some good gaps between these fingers,
| | 01:30 | so I want to compromise somewhere
around here where I see a little bit
| | 01:35 | of that pinky extension on the right but
I haven't lost too much of my gap on the left.
| | 01:40 | Just to give you an idea of how I would look
for Base Frame's later in this footage,
| | 01:44 | this would not make a good base frame
because his hands are almost out of sight.
| | 01:48 | We want to see the maximum amount of foreground
that we are going to select,
| | 01:51 | but somewhere around here, where more
of his hands are exposed on the left
| | 01:56 | and some good gaps between them are shown.
And maybe some around say, there.
| | 02:03 | Again, where we're getting more
of his hands exposed and gaps between
| | 02:07 | the hands to help differentiate between
the foreground and the background.
| | 02:11 | But I'm going to go back to this earlier
frame and time right around 104
| | 02:18 | and use this as my Base Frame.
| | 02:22 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Defining the base frame| 00:08 | Now the first thing I want to do is make
a foreground selection, teach Roto Brush
| | 00:13 | what I considered to be the foreground
object in this layer and namely
| | 00:18 | it's this actor's hands and arms.
| | 00:20 | Although it is just his hands and a
little bit of his wrist that go in front
| | 00:25 | of the screen, quite often, it's better
in the long run to select large continuous
| | 00:29 | portions of a person's body.
| | 00:30 | If I selected only part of his arm,
I might get a matte line,
| | 00:35 | a bit of difference or distinction
where the Roto Brush version of his hand
| | 00:39 | in the foreground joins up with the
normal copy footage in the background.
| | 00:42 | So I'm going to select the Roto Brush tool,
hover my cursor over the Layer panel,
| | 00:48 | and you'll see this little green cross.
| | 00:50 | This green circling cross indicates
I'm about to define the foreground portion
| | 00:55 | of the layer.
| | 00:57 | Now unlike normal painting you don't
want to or need to make very precise
| | 01:02 | strokes right along the edges
between your foreground and background.
| | 01:06 | Roto Brush is the one who's going
to determine where that edge is.
| | 01:09 | What you need to do is make broad strokes
initially to capture as much color
| | 01:14 | information for Roto Brush to use and then
determine where these transitions may be.
| | 01:19 | Resizing the Roto Brush is just like
resizing an ordinary paintbrush.
| | 01:23 | I'll hold Command on Mac or Ctrl
on Windows, click and drag the size
| | 01:29 | of my brush larger or smaller.
| | 01:31 | In this case, since I'm going to be initially
defining my foreground along his arm
| | 01:36 | and up his shoulder, I'm going to
make my initial foreground brush size
| | 01:41 | pretty darn close to the thickness of his wrist.
| | 01:44 | Once I've done that, I'm going
to click inside the foreground.
| | 01:47 | It's very important that you don't
accidentally select the part
| | 01:51 | of the background otherwise you'll
be teaching Roto Brush bad habits.
| | 01:55 | Never lie to Roto Brush,
you'll get in trouble later.
| | 01:57 | And I carefully place my cursor over
the foreground, click and start dragging.
| | 02:03 | As I do so, Roto Brush is going to
draw this green trail to show me
| | 02:09 | what I'm selecting as my foreground.
| | 02:10 | Have you accidentally crossover and
touch a bit of the background,
| | 02:15 | you'll notice that there's a pink
segmentation boundary has selected part
| | 02:19 | of the background and the foreground.
| | 02:21 | That's a bad thing.
| | 02:23 | I'm going to Undo and redraw my stroke
making sure I only select the foreground.
| | 02:31 | Once I release, Roto Brush is going to
draw an initial segmentation boundary.
| | 02:35 | Now I'm going to drag my Layer panel a little
bit taller so you get to see the entire frame.
| | 02:40 | Now Roto Brush did a pretty good job of finding
the hands and arms and a little bit
| | 02:45 | of his hand over here and his shirtsleeve,
but it did not do a perfect job.
| | 02:49 | It's missing his fingers in through here.
| | 02:51 | It's grabbled a little bit of the computer
screen and computer keyboard through here.
| | 02:55 | So you're next task is optionally teaching
Roto Brush where the background is,
| | 03:00 | what it should exclude.
| | 03:02 | To do that, you hold down Option on Mac,
or Alt on Windows, and now you'll see
| | 03:06 | your brush has turned to a red circle
with a minus sign in it and indicates
| | 03:11 | you are going to be subtracting from
your selection rather than adding to it.
| | 03:14 | Now this brush is too big for me to go
down the keyboard or between his fingers,
| | 03:18 | so I'm going to hold Command on Mac,
Ctrl on Windows, resize the brush smaller.
| | 03:24 | Now hold down Option or Alt and drag
from my background that it got correct
| | 03:30 | to the background that it got incorrect.
| | 03:33 | I don't dab and dot and point with Roto Brush,
I like to draw continuous lines
| | 03:38 | to teach Roto Brush this transition or
gradient of colors is what you should be
| | 03:42 | considering all part of the
selection or part of the background.
| | 03:45 | I release, it's done a better job of
getting rid of the keyboard, but it's still
| | 03:51 | making some mistakes.
| | 03:52 | This is where you need to go into
progressively finer and finer detail
| | 03:56 | to keep teaching Roto Brush what's
the foreground and what's the background.
| | 03:59 | So I'm going to zoom up to 200%, hold down
the Spacebar temporarily to pan
| | 04:04 | around my footage and start looking in greater
detail around the shot and how I can correct it.
| | 04:09 | With my green foreground brush,
I'm going to add in the fingers
| | 04:15 | then I'm going to press Command or Ctrl,
make a smaller brush, press Option or Alt
| | 04:20 | and start subtracting some of these
areas between the fingers that
| | 04:23 | are incorrectly selected.
| | 04:24 | You did a good job up there,
I'll get this little bit of keyboard
| | 04:28 | that's missing down here, a little bit of the
laptop frame down in this gap,
| | 04:35 | a little bit more right there.
| | 04:37 | Zoom in another level, pan over,
make a smaller brush, Option or Alt,
| | 04:46 | and cut into this area between the fingers.
| | 04:47 | And these are the tricky areas.
| | 04:49 | You'll notice his fingers are also partially
blurred, a combination of motion blur
| | 04:52 | of him moving so fast, and also
then being out of focus as they get further
| | 04:56 | away from the camera's focal plane.
| | 04:58 | But this pink segmentation
boundary is a binary matte.
| | 05:02 | It's just saying here's the centerline
of where my eventual transparency
| | 05:06 | transition is going to be.
| | 05:08 | So when I release my mouse, you'll see it has
not done a perfect job getting up into this gap.
| | 05:14 | I can keep zooming in and trying to teach
Roto Brush more, what's background
| | 05:20 | and what's foreground, but don't expect
it to grab every single pixel at this point.
| | 05:25 | It's just a centerline as long as since within
a pixel or two, you can correct it later.
| | 05:30 | Now pick a more of this fingertip
that's missing, through here as well,
| | 05:34 | maybe get a little bit more of the finger there,
and keep looking at these fine details.
| | 05:41 | It's doing pretty well through here but
I'm going to subtract a little bit out right
| | 05:46 | into that gap, a little bit more.
| | 05:49 | If you accidentally make a wrong
stroke with Roto Brush, for example,
| | 05:52 | if I accidentally drag into this area, don't
try to correct it by making a second stroke.
| | 05:57 | You're going to be giving Roto Brush
conflicting information.
| | 05:59 | Instead, Undo and make sure your brush strokes
are only exactly where you mean them to be.
| | 06:06 | Two wrongs do not make it right with Roto Brush.
| | 06:11 | Okay, we've got some tricky areas up here
where I need to make some decisions.
| | 06:15 | This area is definitely part of
the picture frame behind his hand.
| | 06:18 | However, the flesh tones in the picture are
very close to the flesh tones in his hand.
| | 06:23 | I'm probably going to have a hard time
creating an automated Roto Brush boundary
| | 06:28 | that differentiates
between those heads and his hand.
| | 06:31 | Meanwhile, this picture
frame is a pretty solid boundary.
| | 06:34 | So I think I'm going to make a decision
here just making a matte line around here,
| | 06:38 | it's outside of the range of the computer
display because that would get me in trouble.
| | 06:43 | As long as I keep a pretty steady line
from frame to frame I can get by
| | 06:48 | with just cutting my matte through here.
| | 06:50 | Again, this is not going to get over
our replacement screen but I want to
| | 06:53 | eventually have a clean matte line where
these joins up with the untouched footage behind.
| | 06:58 | So I'm going to zoom back in.
| | 07:01 | I am going to subtract this part of
the picture frame through here,
| | 07:06 | but make sure I get this corner up there.
| | 07:10 | Come over this direction, the white frame
is going to be pretty hard to tell apart
| | 07:15 | from his light blue shirt, but
let's make sure we don't get any
| | 07:19 | of this little blue sun that's
on top of that picture frame.
| | 07:21 | I'm going to come up here through his
shirt collar and again we've got a collar
| | 07:25 | and a background that's very close to his shirt.
| | 07:28 | I'm not going to try to differentiate
between his shirt and his background.
| | 07:31 | I'm just going to make sure I have a
consistent matte line in this shape.
| | 07:35 | So I'm going to add to the foreground there,
maybe a little bit more, and a little bit more.
| | 07:43 | There we go. I'll keep an eye on that
from frame to frame. Okay.
| | 07:48 | It's going to scroll through this.
| | 07:52 | I'm looking at this shirt and
I may change my mind at this point.
| | 07:56 | The base frame is what you
want to get as right as possible.
| | 07:59 | Make your decisions now rather than later.
| | 08:02 | So even though I talked myself out of trying to
get this entire picture frame,
| | 08:06 | I'm going to do a test stroke here to see
if Roto Brush can differentiate between
| | 08:10 | a frame and a shirt, and looks like it can.
| | 08:12 | So I'm going to go ahead and try to
Roto along the line between his shirt
| | 08:18 | and the picture frame
and do that throughout the shot.
| | 08:21 | The base frame is the time to make
these sorts of decisions as to what
| | 08:27 | you want to try to capture or exclude because
Roto Brush is going to use this information
| | 08:33 | to determine the rest of the shot
and determine your matte from frame to frame.
| | 08:38 | This is looking good, let's go up
around his hand, try to get a little bit more
| | 08:45 | into that gap there and here but I can
work on these semi-transparent areas later.
| | 08:50 | Looking pretty good through there,
pretty good through there.
| | 08:57 | All right. I've now defined my base frame.
| | 09:02 | The next thing I need to do is to teach
Roto Brush how to use this information
| | 09:07 | on subsequent frames earlier and later in time.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting propagation settings| 00:07 | The base frame we created is indicated
by this little gold bar down here
| | 00:13 | in the Layer panel's timeline.
| | 00:15 | The light gray arrows extending to the right
and left are called the Roto Brush Span.
| | 00:21 | The direction of the arrows
indicates in what direction Roto Brush
| | 00:26 | is propagating the information from this base
frame to frames later and earlier in time.
| | 00:32 | Our next step is teaching Roto Brush
how to best propagate that initial information.
| | 00:37 | And to do that, I go to the Effects Control panel
and twirl open the Roto Brush Propagation section.
| | 00:44 | The first area I'm going to pay attention
to is the Search Region, how far Roto Brush
| | 00:49 | is looking to determine any movement in that
boundary between the foreground and background.
| | 00:57 | I can press Page Up or the number 1
on the regular part of the keyboard
| | 01:01 | to step earlier in time and watch
the development of this region.
| | 01:03 | Or I can press 2 or Page Down to step later
in time and watch how this region changes
| | 01:10 | from frame to frame and Roto Brush
tries to determine how the boundary
| | 01:14 | between the foreground
and background is changing.
| | 01:17 | My first job is to step just a couple
of frames away from that base frame
| | 01:21 | in both directions and look for potential trouble.
| | 01:23 | For example, I see some potential problems
around his little finger
| | 01:29 | as he uncurls it and extends it.
| | 01:31 | I see my Search Region is getting pretty close
to chopping off the tip of that finger.
| | 01:37 | That has me a little bit concerned.
| | 01:39 | A Roto Brush may not be capturing
that movement correctly.
| | 01:42 | So I'm going to locate to a frame or
I see potential troubles of that
| | 01:46 | Search Region being too tight on the finger,
it's probably going to be around one second,
| | 01:49 | give or take a frame for you,
and then play with the Search Radius size.
| | 01:54 | I don't want the Search Radius to be
larger than necessary otherwise Roto Brush
| | 02:00 | may be looking at parts of the image
that have nothing to do with the edge
| | 02:04 | between foreground and background and
therefore might capture a false edge.
| | 02:07 | In other words, I want Search Radius
to be small as possible without getting
| | 02:11 | into trouble, but here I see I am
getting into trouble with his current size.
| | 02:15 | So I'm going to slowly scrub it larger until
I see the little finger completely enclosed.
| | 02:20 | We will just a little bit of buffer
around it to convince me Roto Brush is going
| | 02:25 | to capture its movement correctly.
| | 02:26 | You notice that every adjustment
I make it takes a little extra time
| | 02:29 | to calculate because Roto Brush is
propagating the base frame using this
| | 02:33 | information back to my current time location.
| | 02:37 | Search Radius at 33, it's giving me a
nice buffer around that little finger
| | 02:41 | so I'm no longer worried.
| | 02:42 | The next two parameters, Motion Threshold
and Motion Damping, determine how
| | 02:48 | Roto Brush detects movement between
the foreground and background;
| | 02:52 | basically, how the segmentation boundary moves.
| | 02:54 | You don't want Roto Brush
generating false positives.
| | 02:58 | In other words, seeing a motion where there
isn't any, and you don't want false negatives,
| | 03:02 | Roto Brush failing to pick up on motion.
| | 03:06 | Threshold is how much movement Roto Brush
has to see before it says, Okay,
| | 03:10 | I'm convinced the segmentation boundaries moved.
| | 03:13 | Damping is how much it tries to reduce
its tendency to go grab movement
| | 03:16 | that isn't really there.
| | 03:17 | So let's go ahead and keep stepping
through our timeline and look for areas
| | 03:23 | where Roto Brush maybe failing to pick up motion.
| | 03:26 | Now I'm really concerned
about this region right through here.
| | 03:30 | I know this hand is moving every frame,
but when that search region goes down
| | 03:37 | to nothing that indicates Roto Brush does
not think there is movement there,
| | 03:41 | but there is nothing to search for.
That concerns me.
| | 03:44 | So I'm going to slowly reduce the Motion Threshold
until I see the yellow Search Region
| | 03:51 | join up along this edge.
| | 03:55 | Now I'm convinced Roto Brush will pick up
the motion along the edge of that hand.
| | 04:00 | For Motion Damping, I'm going to be
looking for edges that should not be moving,
| | 04:04 | like around this picture frame, and
make sure the Search Region isn't wandering
| | 04:07 | around necessarily when an
edge is not actually moving.
| | 04:11 | In this case, since there is movement
in the camera from frame to frame,
| | 04:17 | it looks like I don't really have any issues
with Roto Brush grabbing
| | 04:22 | too much information and getting false
triggers around stationary edges.
| | 04:26 | I could perhaps increase damping a
little bit if I thought the Search Region
| | 04:30 | was getting too big around this edge,
but I'm pretty comfortable with how
| | 04:33 | it's detecting that edge.
| | 04:34 | So I'm going to leave Motion Damping
at its default of 50%.
| | 04:37 | Once I have these three parameters set
to my liking, I notice that two of them
| | 04:42 | can be key framed if the shot
changes radically overtime.
| | 04:46 | I will disable my View Search Region
and now I'll turn my attention
| | 04:52 | to the Edge Detection and Color models
that the Roto Brush uses.
| | 04:55 | Now that I'm satisfied that the Roto Brush
is looking in the right places for the Edge,
| | 05:01 | next I want to make sure that
Roto Brush is indeed correctly
| | 05:06 | finding that edge as it moves from frame
to frame away from my base frame.
| | 05:10 | So I'm going to start back on my base
frame again, that little yellow bar,
| | 05:15 | and now I'm going to step earlier and later
in time using 1 and 2 on the normal keyboard
| | 05:19 | or Page Up and Page Down on the extended
keyboard and see how well this
| | 05:23 | propagation boundary tracks my foreground.
| | 05:25 | So I move earlier in time, I see I am
having trouble with the gaps between fingers
| | 05:29 | in there and a little bit of trouble tracking
the edge of the laptop down in here.
| | 05:36 | Although again I could make the determination
that I'm happy with the matte line
| | 05:40 | being right there.
| | 05:42 | Far more troublesome are the keyboard
versus the bottom of his hand
| | 05:49 | and also gaps between the fingers
appearing and disappearing.
| | 05:53 | Once I've moved just a couple of frames earlier
or later in time away from the base frame,
| | 05:56 | I'm going to try different choices
for the Edge Detection method
| | 06:02 | and the Color Estimation model used by Roto Brush.
| | 06:05 | Edge Detection gives you three choices:
| | 06:08 | Favor Predicted Edges says, Fall back
on the information we found in the base frame
| | 06:13 | and keep looking for that information
earlier and later in time.
| | 06:18 | In this case, even though I'm a few frames
later than my base frame bias towards
| | 06:22 | was back on that base frame.
| | 06:24 | Favor Current Edges instead says, you
know, this shot to me have changed a lot
| | 06:29 | from frame to frame, put more emphasis
on what happen on the most recent frame
| | 06:33 | not what happened back at the base frame.
| | 06:36 | Balanced, obviously, comes up
with the balance between the two.
| | 06:39 | Now Balanced isn't working great
because I'm finding gaps opening up
| | 06:43 | between these fingers and
problems along the keyboard here.
| | 06:46 | So let's try Favor Predicted Edges.
| | 06:49 | And since I do that you'll notice
that the propagation boundary has indeed
| | 06:54 | tightened up this gap between the fingers
and tightened up the bottom of his wrist
| | 06:58 | as it falls next to the keyboard.
| | 07:00 | Now just to be thorough,
I'm going to try Favor Current Edges.
| | 07:05 | I see these gaps are
opening up again, that not good.
| | 07:09 | And Balance is a little bit better.
| | 07:12 | It got a bit more of the keyboard down here.
| | 07:14 | But obviously, Favor Predicted Edges is giving
me a better solution so I'm going to use that.
| | 07:20 | Next is Alternate Color Estimation,
what color model Roto Brush is using
| | 07:25 | as it tries to find those edges
between foreground and background.
| | 07:28 | In this case you just want to toggle
those parameters on and off and see
| | 07:32 | how well Roto Brush is doing, again, while you
are a couple of frames away from your base frame.
| | 07:37 | So I'll toggle it on and see how things change.
| | 07:41 | Now looks like I'm getting a false positive
here because I don't think there's actually
| | 07:45 | a hole between his shirt and his thumb
and there isn't. So that's wrong.
| | 07:50 | It's also turning out to be a little bit
wavy along the top of the picture frame
| | 07:55 | here compared with color estimation off.
| | 07:57 | So to me it's clear that the default setting
is giving me a more accurate propagation
| | 08:02 | than the Alternate Color model is.
| | 08:05 | So I will leave that off for now.
| | 08:07 | Now that I have set up the parameters
for how Roto Brush should propagate
| | 08:11 | the information from that base frame,
next I need to actually manually teach it,
| | 08:16 | what's right and what's wrong,
as it makes mistakes.
| | 08:20 | And that's what we're going to do next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making corrective strokes| 00:07 | In the previous movie we tweaked Roto Brush's
propagation parameters to help it find
| | 00:12 | the changes in the segmentation boundary
from frame to frame.
| | 00:16 | This will greatly improve Roto Brush's
performances and indeed is an essential step
| | 00:21 | that many people miss.
| | 00:22 | But, it does not make Roto Brush infallible;
| | 00:26 | you will still need to teach it
when it makes mistakes.
| | 00:30 | To do this, you need to first start
from your base frame and then step,
| | 00:37 | frame by frame, later and earlier in time
and look for mistakes.
| | 00:41 | When you make a corrective stroke,
Roto Brush will propagate the new information
| | 00:47 | you've taught it from that frame in
the direction that the arrows in the
| | 00:53 | Roto Brush Span are pointing.
| | 00:55 | Don't jump many frames down the road,
make a correction then go back closer
| | 01:01 | to the base frame and go, "Oh, I'll look
it missed something, let's make a correction here."
| | 01:05 | Roto Brush will not propagate your changes
against the direction of the arrows.
| | 01:10 | It's very important to remember, these
arrows make a big difference
| | 01:15 | in how the information you teach
Roto Brush is used on subsequent frames.
| | 01:19 | So, I'm back on my nice base frame.
| | 01:23 | Let's start by trying to propagate
all the way back to the beginning of this clip.
| | 01:27 | I'm going to press Page Up or the number 1
to step one frame earlier in time,
| | 01:31 | look for mistakes, and there's one right here.
| | 01:33 | I'm going to zoom in, press Option or Alt,
and correct Roto Brush's error right in that gap.
| | 01:43 | I'll zoom in a little bit more
and try to correct that error.
| | 01:47 | Now as we discussed earlier, this pink
segmentation boundary is just the centerline
| | 01:52 | of the alpha channel edge
Roto Brush is going to create.
| | 01:56 | It does create some anti-aliasing and
semi-transparent areas depending on the
| | 02:01 | softness of the edge, motion blur, etc.
| | 02:04 | However, there may be times when you
become a bit unnerved that this propagation
| | 02:09 | boundary is not following sharp angles.
| | 02:11 | If that's the case, you need to turn your
attention to the Matte, Smooth parameter.
| | 02:17 | That's basically an algorithm for how
much Roto Brush is smoothing out this
| | 02:21 | profile's drawing around the edge
between your foreground and background.
| | 02:24 | For example, I'll just take this down
to zero initially and you'll see
| | 02:28 | Roto Brush follows a lot more detail along
that edge maybe even too much detail
| | 02:33 | creating something very jagged.
| | 02:36 | Eventually, you're going to tweak the
Smoothness parameter, they come up
| | 02:39 | with a good balance between tightly following
your edge but not creating little jaggies.
| | 02:44 | For now I'm going to try to find a value
that gives me confidence that
| | 02:48 | Roto Brush is looking at my edge correctly
and not over smoothing the edge
| | 02:54 | and causing me to create incorrect
foreground and background strokes.
| | 02:59 | So I'd say right around here
may be a good compromise value.
| | 03:05 | If I go too far it's a little bit of a
jaggy edge like through here and stir
| | 03:09 | steps that are a little bit nicer.
| | 03:15 | I'll use this as my temporary value while
creating the rest of my corrective strokes.
| | 03:19 | Again, I can always tweak this later.
| | 03:22 | Go back down to 100% and look for other potential
mistakes in Roto Brush's propagation.
| | 03:27 | I've got a little bit down here at the keyboard.
| | 03:30 | So let's press Option or Alt
and fix that edge, that's better.
| | 03:33 | Now zoom in a little bit more here,
hold Command or Ctrl, resize my brush
| | 03:39 | to make a smaller brush, and make sure
I'm getting this gap right in there.
| | 03:43 | It's important to go all the way around
your frame and make sure you're happy
| | 03:50 | that Roto Brush is consistently finding
that boundary between foreground
| | 03:54 | and background that you defined
back in your base frame.
| | 03:57 | We might be missing a little bit of finger
through here so I'm just going
| | 04:01 | to scooch that edge out a
little bit right into there.
| | 04:05 | You can go crazy trying to
make these edges too perfect.
| | 04:12 | When you have a lot of motion from frame
to frame the user is not going to see
| | 04:16 | a lot of these small errors
and the inconsistencies.
| | 04:21 | Perfection is something to strive for,
but you'd drive yourself crazy
| | 04:26 | in trying to achieve it.
| | 04:29 | But this looks like a pretty
good balance for this frame.
| | 04:32 | All the information that I have entered
on that particular frame is actually
| | 04:36 | being stored for the Roto Brush
effect on this layer.
| | 04:40 | I'll type PP and reveal all the individual
strokes I have made to define the
| | 04:45 | base frame and now to update the current frame.
| | 04:48 | Quite often you don't need to look at
these and do anything with them
| | 04:52 | but they are there if you want to turn them
on and off, delete them, etcetera.
| | 04:55 | But I just want to show you that Roto Brush
is indeed recording these strokes
| | 04:59 | and using that information as it
propagates earlier or later in time.
| | 05:04 | And I'll twirl that up for now.
| | 05:05 | I'll press Page Up or the number 1 again
and see how it's doing there.
| | 05:10 | And let's zoom in and again do some corrective
actions for Roto Brush
| | 05:19 | by holding the Spacebar to get the Hand tool
temporarily, panning around my image,
| | 05:24 | and just looking for corrections I need
to make to create a nice consistent Roto Brush
| | 05:33 | outline from frame to frame.
| | 05:35 | Again, remembering that this pink
segmentation boundary is just the centerline
| | 05:40 | for partial transparency,
it's not my final matte.
| | 05:46 | Now I'm going through this fairly quickly
because I don't want to drive you
| | 05:51 | completely crazy with boredom.
| | 05:55 | Normally, I would spend a lot more time
making sure that I am defining all these
| | 06:02 | little corrective strokes
exactly the way that I want to.
| | 06:09 | Don't be afraid of giving Roto Brush
too much information as long as it's
| | 06:14 | correct information.
| | 06:16 | You notice I was making multiple
little strokes into this gap to make sure
| | 06:20 | we got as much information there as possible.
| | 06:22 | Even though the segmentation boundary
didn't change, I didn't mind so much
| | 06:26 | because I was teaching Roto Brush
correct information.
| | 06:29 | If I was teaching Roto Brush bad information,
I would need to undo to unteach it
| | 06:40 | and then make better corrective strokes.
| | 06:43 | If you get to another frame and
there's no need to make a corrective stroke,
| | 06:46 | that's fine.
| | 06:49 | Don't make another corrective stroke.
| | 06:51 | I need to keep tweaking this
little gap between the fingers here.
| | 06:54 | Put a smaller brush into the gap,
that's a bit better.
| | 07:00 | But if you were so fortunate
that you don't need to make any corrections,
| | 07:05 | there's one more pitfall you might run into
with Roto Brush -- and excuse me
| | 07:10 | while I talk and correct at the same time.
| | 07:13 | Oh, big mistake through here.
| | 07:17 | This is why you have to look all the
way around the outline on every frame
| | 07:22 | to make sure you're teaching Roto Brush correctly.
| | 07:25 | I moved one frame earlier and
things are looking pretty good there.
| | 07:28 | I think that gap is as good as I'm going
to get it and anyway I'm getting beyond
| | 07:34 | the edge of my screen here.
| | 07:36 | Yup, that's looking pretty good. Page Up.
| | 07:41 | If I did not have to make any correction
on this frame, and for that matter
| | 07:45 | if I did not have to make any corrections
for the next 20 frames, I might find myself
| | 07:50 | in a situation where I'm at
the end of my Roto Brush Span.
| | 07:54 | If you go one more frame past the
edge of your span, you'll see the
| | 07:59 | pink segmentation boundary is no longer
following the foreground and background,
| | 08:03 | it's jumped to follow the entire frame.
| | 08:06 | That means Roto Brush has not received
any new information for 20 frames
| | 08:11 | and does not feel comfortable
propagating for 21 frames or more;
| | 08:17 | it wishes it had more information.
| | 08:19 | There's a couple of things
you can do at this point.
| | 08:22 | Go ahead and make any corrective stroke
somewhere along the span and Roto Brush
| | 08:27 | will extend the span another
20 frames from that stroke.
| | 08:30 | Or, if you really feel you don't need
to make any more corrective strokes
| | 08:35 | you can hover your cursor over the edges
of the Roto Brush Span and drag it
| | 08:40 | earlier or later in time to cover as many
frames as you feel comfortable having
| | 08:45 | Roto Brush automatically propagate your information.
| | 08:47 | Now in my case, I am not comfortable.
| | 08:50 | I'm seeing Roto Brush continue to
make little errors from frame to frame.
| | 08:54 | For example, there's a gap opening up
between fingers here and I want to make
| | 08:58 | sure Roto Brush gets that gap.
| | 09:03 | Those who have spent any time on the
underground system in England
| | 09:09 | feel free to start chanting Mind the Gap.
| | 09:11 | Those who have been to England on the
underground know what I'm talking about.
| | 09:15 | The rest of you can look it up
so you've got party trivia.
| | 09:21 | And I want to make sure that
I'm keeping a consistent edge between
| | 09:24 | foreground and background as I pan
around this image. Good.
| | 09:31 | Oops!
| | 09:32 | See, you have to look.
| | 09:35 | And if Roto Brush grabs too much information
as long as your stroke was good
| | 09:39 | you don't need to undo.
| | 09:41 | I'll just add another corrective stroke
to help teach Roto Brush
| | 09:45 | what the difference is
between foreground and background.
| | 09:47 | It's a little bit of a mistake
in through there.
| | 09:51 | By the way, Roto Brush does like to
start chewing away this bracelet
| | 09:56 | I have found out because I've
done a shot a bunch of times.
| | 10:01 | That's another area for you to
watch out for as you go around the shot.
| | 10:06 | I could grab a little bit more in that area.
| | 10:09 | Again, I'm looking for the central line
of my eventual transparency.
| | 10:14 | Shadow areas get tricky.
| | 10:20 | Here's definitely a case for that
bracelet disappeared in the shadow and
| | 10:24 | Roto Brush can't tell the difference
between shadow and bracelet, so I'll help it
| | 10:29 | define those areas until it does a
better job at determining that edge.
| | 10:35 | And that looks good.
| | 10:38 | One more frame earlier, you notice
that Roto Brush did indeed realize that
| | 10:42 | that gap was still there but I do need to
teach it a little bit more to improve that gap.
| | 10:47 | That's better.
| | 10:54 | Let's make sure I'm not eroding too
much of the fingers away. That's not bad.
| | 10:58 | Good. Good.
| | 11:05 | I could arguably go after a little gap there.
| | 11:08 | Definitely, I have some issues through here.
| | 11:14 | Oops, it's missing a bit of bracelet there.
| | 11:18 | See what I just did there?
| | 11:19 | I held the wrong key down, and I made a
background stroke through the foreground.
| | 11:24 | Don't make another foreground stroke;
| | 11:26 | two wrongs do not make a right.
| | 11:29 | Undo and then make the
correct stroke through that area.
| | 11:33 | Some little touch ups.
| | 11:41 | Big problems with the shadows here,
so let's go ahead and correct that.
| | 11:46 | A little bit in that area and that area,
major problem right in through there.
| | 11:53 | But now I've got a reasonable centerline.
| | 11:56 | Make sure you get a little bit more of
this fingertip here but otherwise
| | 12:01 | Roto Brush has been doing a pretty good job
with the motion blurred fingertips and
| | 12:04 | we'll show you how Roto Brush handles Motion
Blur a little bit later on. Okay, that's good.
| | 12:10 | Rather than keeping you here for
another 20 minutes, half hour, however long
| | 12:15 | it's going to take to set through all
these frames, I am going to leave you
| | 12:21 | the rest of these frames back to time zero as
an exercise for you to go ahead and clean up.
| | 12:30 | I think by now you have an idea of
what I'm doing and you might need to go
| | 12:35 | back and forth through your frames multiple
times to get this the way you want it to be.
| | 12:44 | But now you know what you need to do
to teach Roto Brush, the differences
| | 12:50 | between foreground and background,
and you might say to yourself "this seems
| | 12:54 | like a lot of work," and you'd be right.
| | 12:56 | Oops, wrong stroke.
| | 12:59 | It is a lot of work, but it is far less work,
and if I had to repaint the alpha channel
| | 13:07 | all the way around
the shape on every single frame.
| | 13:12 | I'm just making a couple of small corrective
strokes here and there not having
| | 13:16 | to repaint every single pixel of the alpha.
| | 13:18 | So no matter how tedious this is,
it could be and would be a lot worse.
| | 13:29 | Okay, you can take it from here.
| | 13:32 | Keep working until you have
propagated your segmentation boundary
| | 13:35 | all the way back to time zero.
| | 13:36 | And when you're done, move on to the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating multiple spans| 00:07 | It is indeed about a good 20 minutes later,
and I'm going to set my Roto Brush effect
| | 00:11 | and type PP and show you that
I've made 173 strokes total to define
| | 00:18 | from my Base Frame back to time zero (x0).
| | 00:20 | So I don't want you to be under any illusions
that this is a automated process.
| | 00:26 | Roto Brush greatly reduces the amount
of work you need to do but
| | 00:31 | you still need to do some work.
| | 00:33 | Saving the Propagation parameters early
on will help reduce that amount of work.
| | 00:37 | And now as I drag my time indicator,
through my timeline, you can see I have
| | 00:42 | set up a propagation boundary for all these frames.
| | 00:45 | Tricky areas was in here where his
little finger is moving inside the shadows
| | 00:48 | of his hand, a little gap here, managing
the gap here between the thumb, the laptop
| | 00:54 | and the shirt sleeve but I worked
my way through all those frames.
| | 00:58 | Now let's go back to the Base Frame and
think about propagating forward in time.
| | 01:04 | I want to see how far this Base Frame
provides good information going forward
| | 01:08 | making corrective strokes as I go,
as close to the Base Frame as I can,
| | 01:12 | propagating outward and then see if
I might need to create another Base Frame
| | 01:17 | with an entirely separate Roto Brush Span
later in time to join up with this one.
| | 01:22 | We'll go one frame forward.
| | 01:25 | Actually, it looks pretty good.
| | 01:26 | Another frame forward. Good.
| | 01:28 | Another frame forward, things are
going much better propagating forward
| | 01:33 | than they were backward.
| | 01:34 | That's why I chose the Base Frame that I did.
| | 01:37 | In subsequent frames, we actually see less
of the foreground than we're worried about;
| | 01:42 | his arm blocks his hand, his hands close up
where the gaps between his fingers close up
| | 01:46 | and there's less work
away from that Base Frame.
| | 01:50 | I'm going to zoom in here
and improve the gap until there.
| | 01:56 | I'll keep moving forward.
| | 01:58 | Now we need some Roto Brush
corrective work to improve these gaps.
| | 02:01 | Again, I'm just making a centerline here.
| | 02:03 | And subtract around this thumb tip there.
| | 02:06 | A little bit of the keyboard here.
| | 02:14 | In general, not bad.
| | 02:18 | And keep stepping forward in fixing
these little problems from frame to frame.
| | 02:23 | Now I am searching around to the entire
segmentation boundary, every frame
| | 02:28 | and making corrective strokes.
| | 02:31 | But you could choose to a divide and conquer,
maybe do one pass working in just the left side,
| | 02:36 | go back to Base Frame then make another pass
just working on the right side.
| | 02:41 | This isn't too bad though.
| | 02:49 | A little bit of the keyboard here.
| | 02:54 | Less critical through here where
we're not actually over the screen.
| | 02:57 | The viewer's attention
probably won't be down here.
| | 03:00 | I'm just trying to keep a consistent
line so that any matte line between my
| | 03:04 | Roto Brushed foreground and the
untouched background isn't too obvious.
| | 03:08 | Press Page Down or the number 2
to step forward and continue
| | 03:18 | to make corrective strokes.
| | 03:20 | Up a little bit of these
fingers appearing underneath here.
| | 03:24 | Let's make sure we grab that.
| | 03:25 | Take out some on the
keyboard and a little bit there.
| | 03:31 | I know some of you will probably find
it instructive to watch me go through
| | 03:37 | every frame of the shot
and see what it is I'm looking for.
| | 03:41 | I'm sure others of you are probably
going to get bored stiff watching me
| | 03:46 | go through every single frame.
| | 03:47 | So there will come a point here soon enough,
| | 03:50 | that I'm going to go ahead and just cut the
video, finish the rest of the shot
| | 03:56 | and then move forward to my next
important technique to discuss.
| | 04:00 | Basically, when do you give up one span
and start creating the second span.
| | 04:07 | It's several minutes later and I have
been propagating strokes away from my
| | 04:12 | Base Frame in the direction of the Roto
Brush Span arrows and I'm getting to a point
| | 04:16 | where I see some major changes in motion.
| | 04:19 | These few frames are indeed being tracked
pretty well by Roto Brush but I see
| | 04:24 | that I have his left hand raising.
| | 04:26 | I'm starting to see some gaps open up
between the fingers of his hand.
| | 04:31 | Indeed, I need to zoom in here and do
another background stroke in this gap
| | 04:36 | that's opening up between his fingers.
| | 04:39 | From this frame forward, I see I'm
getting significant movement and Roto Brush
| | 04:44 | is missing information as gaps open up.
| | 04:47 | I could keep making corrective strokes
and propagating that information forward
| | 04:52 | but at some point when you find yourself
making major changes on every frame,
| | 04:56 | you have to ask yourself, "Is more
of the foreground being revealed?
| | 05:00 | Is that why Roto Brush is having trouble?
| | 05:02 | Would I be better off picking a new
Base Frame later in time and propagating
| | 05:08 | that information back to join this one?"
| | 05:11 | And indeed in this shot, since he is
raising his hands, I think I would
| | 05:16 | go to a new pose somewhere around here
where his hands are the most open and I've got
| | 05:21 | a clear shot defining the gaps between his
fingers and start a brand new Base Frame there.
| | 05:28 | So I would back up my Roto Brush Span
back to around 0:00:01:27, my last good frame
| | 05:33 | of my previous look, which is right
around there, then move to here
| | 05:39 | and start all over, again, larger
brush and defining a new Base Frame.
| | 05:46 | You'll see that Roto Brush has created
a brand new yellow dash for my base
| | 05:52 | and a new propagation span going forward in
time and going back to join my previous span.
| | 05:59 | You might think you'd have a lot of trouble
around that boundary but if you've done
| | 06:03 | your job of defining foreground
and background strokes, Roto Brush
| | 06:11 | is using the same algorithms underneath
the hood and you actually get a really
| | 06:14 | good seam right in that area.
| | 06:15 | So to really finish this shot off,
you'd indeed want to create as many spans
| | 06:20 | as necessary to pick different points
in time as his hands open and close.
| | 06:25 | For now I'm just going to go ahead and
go back to this last good propagation frame
| | 06:29 | at 0:00:01:27, press N to end my work area
at this point and focus on getting
| | 06:35 | a good look through here and then
you can repeat the same concepts
| | 06:39 | later on throughout the shot.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining the matte| 00:07 | Now that you've finished all of this work
of creating your segmentation boundary
| | 00:11 | across your entire Roto Brush Span,
you really don't want to lose this work
| | 00:16 | so it's a good idea to do a Save or even better
an Increment and Save so you can go back
| | 00:22 | to an earlier version of your project
in case you take a detour and decide
| | 00:26 | maybe what's the right path to follow.
| | 00:28 | Now if you've been following along
and you have a segmentation boundary
| | 00:31 | you're pretty proud of,
you can continue with that composition.
| | 00:34 | If you've not made it this far and if
you have access to the Exercise Files
| | 00:38 | that come with this lesson,
go ahead and open up Comps_finished,
| | 00:41 | RB2-Screen Replacement-Step 16.
| | 00:42 | This is after I've created the segmentation
boundary for you and I'll continue
| | 00:49 | with this one as well and double-click
Actor Roto to get it opened in my Layer panel.
| | 00:55 | You notice that I don't have the little
bars extending from my Base Frame
| | 01:00 | that indicates that Roto Brush has not had
an opportunity to go ahead and propagate
| | 01:04 | that information out and calculate these frames.
| | 01:07 | If you are happy with your segmentation
boundary, a good strategy is to go ahead
| | 01:12 | and click the Freeze button.
| | 01:14 | This says, go ahead and calculate all
of the Roto Brush propagation for all the frames
| | 01:20 | inside of your Roto Brush Span and allows
you to save these along with your project.
| | 01:25 | That will make working with Roto Brush,
and even more important rendering
| | 01:29 | Roto Brush, go much faster.
| | 01:31 | So I'm going to go ahead and freeze
this propagation boundary.
| | 01:35 | You'll see the blue line
indicating frozen frames.
| | 01:38 | And if I decided to change this
segmentation boundary later,
| | 01:41 | I can always unfreeze it.
| | 01:42 | But now that I've done this, I'll go
ahead and Increment and Save again.
| | 01:48 | Now if I open up this project later,
I would have these cached Roto Brush frames.
| | 01:54 | The segmentation boundary
is just a binary matte;
| | 01:57 | on or off, are you foreground or background.
| | 01:59 | It's come time to start saying just
how good this matte is and to refine it.
| | 02:03 | To do so, I'm going to go down to these
extra buttons that were added
| | 02:08 | in After Effects CS5 along with the
introduction of Roto Brush.
| | 02:10 | It gives you some additional options of
how you view the Alpha channel of any layer.
| | 02:14 | For example, if I turn off the segmentation
boundary, I will now get
| | 02:19 | my Alpha channel display for this layer.
| | 02:20 | I will now see my foreground and no background.
| | 02:23 | If I want to look at the Alpha channel,
I'll click on the Toggle Alpha button.
| | 02:27 | If I like the Photoshop Style Red Overlay,
here I can see my background
| | 02:32 | but with a selectable color overlaying
the background portion of my shot.
| | 02:35 | I want to go ahead and just leave these
all turned off, no segmentation boundary,
| | 02:40 | and turn off my toggle transparency so
I can see against the black background.
| | 02:44 | This is the result of my binary matte,
a little rough here and there.
| | 02:48 | Let's go ahead and improve that.
| | 02:49 | With my Actor Roto still selected,
I'm going to press F3 to reopen my
| | 02:54 | Effects Control panel, look at the
Matte section and enable Refine Matte.
| | 02:59 | This engages a second section of Roto Brush
where it smoothes out the matte,
| | 03:04 | looks for areas of partial transparency
and alters the Alpha channel,
| | 03:09 | calculates motion blur and
decontaminates color around the edges.
| | 03:12 | Let's discuss what all of those mean.
| | 03:14 | To see my shot in context, I'm going to
bring my Composition panel forward again.
| | 03:18 | Now I have my Actor Roto layer
with the Roto Brush overlaid on top of
| | 03:24 | my screen and my background.
| | 03:26 | Turn it off and on and solo it, just to
give you an indication of what these layers are.
| | 03:33 | First I'm going to work with these
Smooth, Feather and Choke parameters.
| | 03:37 | Roto Brush defaults to value of 2.0 for Smooth.
| | 03:40 | I reduced it temporarily while
I was creating my segmentation boundary.
| | 03:43 | Let's see whether or not we need additional
smoothing or less smoothing for that boundary.
| | 03:50 | You'll notice that if I increase smoothing
too much, you will start to see
| | 03:55 | bits of the original footage creep into
these gaps and blot out portions
| | 04:01 | of my new control panel screen.
| | 04:02 | On the other hand, if I take smoothing
down too much, you'll see some fairly
| | 04:07 | jagged lines around the edges
of my Roto Brush matte.
| | 04:10 | So I want to scrub to pick a value
where I'm not picking up any of the original
| | 04:15 | shots where it's not supposed to be
such as between his fingers but don't have
| | 04:19 | too jagged of a boundary
or get some ghosting like I do here.
| | 04:25 | I'm going to say that right around here
is a fairly good value.
| | 04:29 | Let's increase a little bit here
and I'm fairly happy with that compromise.
| | 04:34 | Now this is me looking at one frame
namely the Base Frame.
| | 04:38 | Always check your work
later and earlier in time.
| | 04:42 | For example, when I go earlier in time,
I see that I have a nasty edge around here.
| | 04:47 | This is a case where I might want a bit more
smoothing to get rid of some this jaggieness.
| | 04:54 | So let's crank up the smoothing a little bit
and at least smooth out that profile.
| | 04:59 | I need to find a compromised value
that's going to work throughout this shot.
| | 05:07 | In addition to smoothing,
I can balance off the Feather and Choke.
| | 05:11 | Feather is how soft the transitions
between the foreground and background are.
| | 05:15 | If I have no Feather, I'm back to a
fairly hard binary matte and you can see
| | 05:20 | a bit of aliasing on these edges.
| | 05:22 | If I have too much Feather, that will
really soften my transition but I can
| | 05:26 | get a little too puffy, a little bit too soft,
I can introduce some unwanted areas again.
| | 05:31 | So I need to find a balance between Feather,
which creates some nice soft edges
| | 05:37 | and Choke, which either says get rid
of some artifacts around the edges,
| | 05:41 | basically reduce the boundary, and
I can go too tight on that, or go the other
| | 05:47 | direction, expand the Alpha channel.
| | 05:48 | There I am creating some haloing that I
don't like so that's obviously not very good.
| | 05:52 | I find that increasing my Feather while
keeping by smoothing down is getting
| | 05:58 | rid of most of my artifacts.
| | 05:59 | So let's see if we did a little bit of
choking now, and get rid of the last
| | 06:04 | of the artifacts at hand.
| | 06:05 | That looks fairly good.
| | 06:06 | I maybe eating away a little too much
of his bracelet here, I could possibly
| | 06:11 | need to go back and redo my segmentation
boundary just for this portion
| | 06:15 | of his wrist to make sure I don't lose
too much of the bracelet.
| | 06:19 | Let's go ahead and look at some
other points in time to see how well
| | 06:23 | I'm balancing off by smoothing.
| | 06:25 | I have got a little issue down here in the hand,
with all of my other parameters
| | 06:31 | and that's too little smoothing.
| | 06:33 | Let's experiment with the Choke a
little bit until I'm fairly happy,
| | 06:39 | I have got a good compromise
throughout this shot.
| | 06:42 | Keeping in mind that this will also
be in motion, I'll definitely need to
| | 06:47 | -- yup, I got to increase my smoothing
back a little bit to get rid of that artifact.
| | 06:51 | Keeping in mind I'm looking for a
good compromise across all frames.
| | 06:54 | A little more Choke, yeah.
| | 06:58 | There's one more parameter in this
section to discuss before we move on.
| | 07:01 | It's called Reduce Chatter.
| | 07:03 | There can be a problem if you have a
somewhat stationary object but
| | 07:06 | there's noise in your video or your film
that is causing Roto Brush to think
| | 07:11 | your edge is actually moving when it's not.
| | 07:13 | If you see stationary or slow moving
edges where the Alpha just seems
| | 07:17 | to be bouncing and jittering too much,
increase Reduce Chatter.
| | 07:21 | On the other hand if you have moving edges
where Roto Brush is missing subtle movement,
| | 07:25 | you can decrease Reduce Chatter
to go ahead and allow those edges back in
| | 07:29 | and I find that actually decreasing
Reduce Chatter is giving me a little bit
| | 07:34 | of the wrist back at the expense
of getting a little bit of
| | 07:37 | an artifact back there.
| | 07:38 | So I'm going to try to find a compromise
at a lower setting maybe a little bit
| | 07:45 | more Choke that might give me a better solution.
| | 07:47 | I'm going to go with minimal Reduce Chatter
and just a little bit more Choke.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring Motion Blur and Decontaminate Edge Color| 00:07 | Finally, let's talk about
Motion Blur and Decontamination.
| | 00:11 | Roto Brush has the ability to automatically
detect what portion of an edge
| | 00:14 | is moving and give that edge
additional blur to compensate just
| | 00:19 | as real footage maybe blurred.
| | 00:20 | Let's go to around Frame 26
where his hand is raising somewhat quickly.
| | 00:26 | If I turn off Use Motion Blur,
all I'm going to get is my softened,
| | 00:31 | feathered edge around this area.
| | 00:34 | However, if I enable Use Motion Blur,
you'll see that this hand is more blurred
| | 00:39 | than other portions of his body,
which are not moving nearly as much.
| | 00:42 | If I want to I can solo this layer
and compare without and with.
| | 00:48 | Look at just the Alpha channel
without Motion Blur, even edge Feather
| | 00:55 | all the way around, with Motion Blur
increase blur where his hand is moving.
| | 00:59 | And I can tweak the motion blur settings
to include more Samples Per Frame,
| | 01:03 | basically smooth out any ghosting if there's
fast movement, and also set Shutter Angle
| | 01:07 | to match how my shot was originally taken.
| | 01:11 | No Shutter Angle is very little blur.
| | 01:14 | Increase Shutter Angle is more blur.
| | 01:16 | A lot of footage tends to be shot with
the Shutter Angle of 180 degrees
| | 01:21 | but it's good to know the camera settings
so that you can match the shutter speed
| | 01:26 | versus the duration of an individual frame
to come up with a good Shutter Angle.
| | 01:29 | If the shutter opening time is identical
to the duration of your frame,
| | 01:33 | then you want your Shutter Angle to be 360.
| | 01:35 | If the time of the shutter is open is
only half of the duration of the frame
| | 01:39 | then 180 degrees, one half of
a full circle, is appropriate.
| | 01:42 | And I'll go back to RGB and unsolo my layer
because it's good to see things in context
| | 01:48 | just for reality check.
| | 01:49 | Finally, there is a Higher Quality
switch in Motion Blur.
| | 01:53 | Higher Quality always comes at
the cost of additional render time.
| | 01:55 | It was not that bad of a hit.
| | 01:57 | I have personally found that toggling it on
has given me a little bit cleaner of an edge.
| | 02:02 | For example, around these fingertips as I move.
| | 02:04 | So I'm going to leave Higher Quality on.
| | 02:07 | Now let's talk about Decontamination,
and by that we mean how much of the
| | 02:13 | background color is being removed or
decontaminated from the edges of your object.
| | 02:17 | Roto Brush does not color-correct
the entire image.
| | 02:20 | It's only color-correcting the edges,
and if you want to see where it is correcting
| | 02:23 | go ahead and enable View Decontamination.
| | 02:27 | If you have a particularly soft shot,
you might need a wider area of Decontamination
| | 02:31 | because more of the background
is seeping through these
| | 02:35 | partially transparent areas around your edges.
| | 02:38 | So you can go ahead and increase the
decontamination zone if you so desire
| | 02:42 | but don't do that unnecessarily.
| | 02:43 | You might get some additional color artifact
you don't really want in your edges.
| | 02:46 | If I turn it off and increase my
decontamination, you can see
| | 02:50 | these additional ghosts that appear.
| | 02:51 | I'll set that back down to zero.
| | 02:53 | You can toggle the effects
of the color-correction off and on.
| | 02:59 | I find it when it's off, and I'm now seeing
some of my dark background appear on these edges.
| | 03:03 | That's not desirable so I'll leave it on.
| | 03:05 | If you think it's performing too drastic
of a color-correction,
| | 03:08 | if you're starting to see some color-ghosting
around your edges, you can reduce
| | 03:11 | the amount of decontamination.
| | 03:13 | Too much, again I'm getting that dark ghosting.
| | 03:15 | 100% is actually giving me
the look I desire in this case.
| | 03:19 | Finally, there's Extend Where Smooth
and again I'll turn my
| | 03:22 | Decontamination Matte back on.
| | 03:24 | If Reduce Chatter is greater than zero
and if Roto Brush determines it needs to
| | 03:30 | de-chatter an area, Extend Where Smooth says,
"Well, let's do some extra color
| | 03:35 | decontamination around those areas."
| | 03:36 | Because I have a very low chatter amount,
there's not a lot of additional smoothing
| | 03:40 | of the matte taking place.
| | 03:42 | But if Reduce Chatter was too high value,
I'll just artificially put it to 100% right now,
| | 03:46 | you'll see that Roto Brush
is doing some more smoothing out
| | 03:51 | of the Alpha boundary and Extend Where Smooth says,
"Let's go ahead and do more color
| | 03:56 | decontamination in those areas."
| | 03:58 | In my case well, I decided
I need very little Reduce Chatter,
| | 04:02 | Extend Where Smooth does not help me at all.
| | 04:04 | But it's not one of those parameters
where you can toggle it on and off,
| | 04:08 | look very closely at your image and see
if it's making a positive change or not.
| | 04:11 | If it's not making a positive change,
leave it off and in general
| | 04:16 | that's a rule of After Effects.
| | 04:17 | If you toggle on a switch and it doesn't
seem to do anything, turn it back off again
| | 04:21 | because you may not know what
it's doing at another frame
| | 04:25 | you're not currently looking at.
| | 04:26 | And by the way, all of these refine matte
parameters are not limited to Roto Brush.
| | 04:31 | There is actually a standalone effect
called Refine Matte which you can apply
| | 04:36 | after anything that creates an Alpha channel
including say a color key operation.
| | 04:40 | That's another trick to keep in mind.
| | 04:42 | Well, now that we've refined the matte
for this particular Roto Brush application,
| | 04:45 | let's go ahead and queue up our RAM Preview.
| | 04:48 | I pressed zero (0) on numeric keypad.
| | 04:50 | Again, if you have a Mac you
can press Ctrl+0 on your keyboard.
| | 04:54 | That's to help out people with
Mac Books that don't have
| | 04:58 | numeric keypad equivalents.
| | 04:59 | Let's see how we do.
| | 05:01 | I am finding a little bit of artifacting
around this particular edge,
| | 05:04 | I'll probably need to go back and clean up
the segmentation boundary around here
| | 05:07 | but let's see this full thing in motion because
quite often problems on individual frames
| | 05:11 | aren't an issue
when you're actually moving quickly.
| | 05:15 | Now they're playing back at full speed.
| | 05:17 | I see that I do need some de-chattering
because I am having some little bumps
| | 05:21 | going on here and there.
| | 05:22 | So if I hit Increase, I Reduce Chatter amount
until I see these little artifacts
| | 05:26 | start to disappear.
| | 05:27 | Maybe a little bit more choking
and let's RAM preview again and see
| | 05:33 | if that improved the final render at all.
| | 05:35 | I cannot emphasize enough how much Roto Brush
is not a "Set it and done effect."
| | 05:40 | It takes a lot of iterative work, a lot
of going back and refining what you're doing
| | 05:44 | until you come up with a desirable result.
| | 05:47 | This is pretty close.
| | 05:48 | I am observing a little bit of trouble
right here where a small dark area appears
| | 05:52 | and through the bracelet on his wrist.
| | 05:55 | I can go ahead and keep tweaking parameters,
tweak my segmentation boundary,
| | 05:59 | and remember to do that you will need
to unfreeze to be able to go back and
| | 06:03 | edit your boundary.
| | 06:04 | And if necessary use other tricks
such as masking or even the paint effect
| | 06:09 | to paint back in missing gaps in the
Alpha channel or to paint out, if it's the
| | 06:14 | background, that have crept in that I don't want.
| | 06:17 | Still using Roto Brush is a big timesaving
as compared to hand masking every single frame
| | 06:22 | or hand painting the Alpha channel
for every single frame.
| | 06:27 | Just follow this procedure of Base Frame,
propagation, corrective strokes,
| | 06:33 | refine matte and you'll get a lot better
results than other people who have just been
| | 06:37 | applying a Roto Brush, making a couple strokes
and saying, "It doesn't work."
| | 06:40 | It does, there's just some assembly required.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. The Puppet ToolsOverview of the Puppet Pin tool| 00:07 |
Next we're going to show you a
wonderful set of distortion tools in After
| | 00:10 |
Effects, known incredibly as the Puppet tools.
| | 00:13 |
But before we do so you
need to reset your workspace.
| | 00:15 |
It's probably at Paint right now, go
ahead and set it back to Standard and
| | 00:21 |
select Reset "Standard" to make sure
you're at a good, clean starting point.
| | 00:26 |
Now I'm going to go ahead and switch to
my special AEA workspace which optimizes
| | 00:30 |
the layout for screen capture
but it is very similar to Standard.
| | 00:33 |
If you have access to the Exercise
Files that came with this lesson, go to the
| | 00:37 |
Comps folder and open up
the Comp O4-Puppet*starter.
| | 00:41 |
Now for those who're in a modern art
you may recognize this as a character from
| | 00:45 |
a mural painting called Harlequin's
Carnival, and there is lots of interesting
| | 00:49 |
appendages for us to tug on, bend, and distort.
| | 00:52 |
To perform puppet distortion you use
the Puppet tools represented by this
| | 00:57 |
Pushpin icon along your toolbar.
| | 00:59 |
If you don't see your toolbar by
the way it's underneath Window>Tools.
| | 01:03 |
I'm going to select the very
first tool called the Puppet Pin tool;
| | 01:08 |
this is what you perform your
distortion and animation with.
| | 01:11 |
As soon as you select any of the
Puppet tools some additional parameters will
| | 01:15 |
appear along the top of your toolbar.
| | 01:17 |
We'll discuss each of these as they come
up, but for now make sure the Mesh
| | 01:22 |
Show is currently checked or enabled.
| | 01:25 |
To use the Puppet tool first make sure
your Current Time Indicator is at the
| | 01:28 |
very start of your composition.
| | 01:30 |
This is because Puppet tool is
different from the other tools in After Effects
| | 01:33 |
and that it sets keyframes the
moment you start to use the tool.
| | 01:37 |
And more than likely you want your first
keyframe to be at the start of your comp.
| | 01:40 |
Hover your cursor over the object you'd
like to distort and you see the cursor
| | 01:44 |
is changed to a little pushpin.
| | 01:45 |
I'm going to hover over someplace that
I'd like this character to be anchored,
| | 01:49 |
for example maybe his ankle or his toe.
| | 01:52 |
Click, as soon as I do so, you'll see
that his outline, his Alpha Channel has
| | 01:58 |
been encased by a Mesh made
up of individual triangles.
| | 02:02 |
If you're having trouble seeing
these triangles, the layer's label color
| | 02:06 |
actually affects the color of that Mesh.
| | 02:08 |
I want to pick something strong like a
Purple so that you can see it more clearly.
| | 02:13 |
Now Puppet is actually an effect
applied to a layer, and like all effects in
| | 02:18 |
order to see its custom user-
interface you need to select the effect.
| | 02:22 |
By doing so you'll now see the pin
that we've placed on this guy's ankle.
| | 02:28 |
If you want to see the Mesh select
the Mesh and now that will appear.
| | 02:33 |
The triangles in this Mesh determine
how much resolution you have when you
| | 02:36 |
distort the character.
| | 02:38 |
More triangles cleaner distortion, but
also more triangles longer render times.
| | 02:43 |
I personally find the default of 350 to
be a bit course, it will give me kinks
| | 02:47 |
in many of my characters.
| | 02:49 |
I tend to set this to at least 500, and if I
have a fast computer I will set it up to a 1000.
| | 02:54 |
You see we now have a final Mesh and
this will give me smoother distortions.
| | 02:58 |
The other interesting
parameter here is Expansion.
| | 03:00 |
It's basically saying how far beyond the
Alpha channel should After Effects draw
| | 03:06 |
the Mesh that encases your character.
| | 03:08 |
Now you might think, oh, although it's just
to follow the Alpha Channels, set it down to 0.
| | 03:13 |
The problem with doing that is that
triangles are actually just a bunch of
| | 03:17 |
straight line segments.
| | 03:18 |
If you use too few of them and have no
expansion they may cut off portions of
| | 03:23 |
the character you're trying to outline.
| | 03:24 |
If I set this to a very low number
like 200, and zoom in a little bit here,
| | 03:31 |
you'll see that the Mesh is actually
cutting off, for example, parts of his head,
| | 03:35 |
so that's why you need have enough
triangles to get a good approximation of your
| | 03:40 |
character, and set the
expansion a little bit bigger such as 1.
| | 03:45 |
The other thing that Expansion
controls is how different sections of your
| | 03:49 |
character are bound together.
| | 03:51 |
If I have a higher expansion like the
default of 3, you'll see that this area
| | 03:55 |
here with a hair in the
hat gets meshed together.
| | 03:58 |
Hair in the hat, these two pieces of
hair and a strand off the left are now all
| | 04:02 |
meshed together and these
guys have their own independence.
| | 04:05 |
If I set it too high, the whole
top piece would get meshed into one.
| | 04:09 |
You may want this in some cases, for
example this now means that this entire
| | 04:13 |
unit will bend as a whole.
| | 04:16 |
However, if I want finer control, a
smaller mesh will now break this up to where
| | 04:20 |
the stem, these strands are now
treated separately than the hat on the top
| | 04:24 |
strands, so Expansion also affects how
finely you can control your character.
| | 04:28 |
I'm going to press Shift+/ to center my
Comp panel and in the next movie we'll
| | 04:33 |
show you how to create
additional pins to distort your character.
| | 04:47 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Distorting a layer| 00:07 |
In the previous movie we created
a Mesh around the Alpha channel of
| | 00:10 |
the character we wanted to
distort and set up our Expansion and
| | 00:12 |
Triangles parameters.
| | 00:14 |
In this movie we're going to add more
pins and start distorting our character.
| | 00:18 |
You need at least two pins to do
something with a Puppet tool, generally one pin
| | 00:23 |
to anchor and another pin to
stretch and distort your character.
| | 00:28 |
I'm going to place one right here
where he grabs onto this pencil, and you'll
| | 00:31 |
notice as soon as I set a pin the
little icon at the foot of my cursor
| | 00:35 |
changes to a four-point arrow, that
indicates that I can pick it up and move
| | 00:38 |
it, for example like this.
| | 00:41 |
As I do so After Effects will distort
the pixels encased inside the Mesh as
| | 00:46 |
necessary to try to stretch
between the two pins I have set.
| | 00:49 |
Now in this case two pins give me not
really good control because the other foot
| | 00:55 |
is coming off the around.
| | 00:55 |
I'm going to undo, and go back and set
another pin on the other ankle to keep
| | 01:01 |
this guy rooted on the ground for now.
| | 01:03 |
Now as I am pulling his arm you'll see
except for a littlie bit of a toe-tapping
| | 01:06 |
action, he now stays on the
ground as I distort him around.
| | 01:11 |
You can set as many pins as you
like but it is a balancing act.
| | 01:15 |
The more pins you set the more control
you will have, I'm going to go ahead and
| | 01:19 |
undo, but also the more pins you need to manage.
| | 01:22 |
For example if I don't want this
character bending that much, I might put
| | 01:27 |
another pin and say his head to help anchor him.
| | 01:31 |
So now you'll see him place like that
as I move the arm back and forth, or I'll
| | 01:35 |
undo and undo again to get rid of that pin.
| | 01:38 |
I might set it somewhere say in his
torso, and in this case that limits the
| | 01:43 |
movement but you'll note that pulling
on one part of the character will still
| | 01:47 |
cause other portion of it to move around.
| | 01:49 |
Now you see this yellow outline
that I've got over the character.
| | 01:53 |
After Effects is always working
off the initial Mesh that it drew.
| | 01:57 |
It only looks at the Alpha channel at
the moment you create that first pin.
| | 02:01 |
So another gotcha with Puppet tool is
you cannot have a layer with an animating
| | 02:06 |
Alpha channel, After Effects
will ignore the later animation.
| | 02:09 |
This original alliance is particularly
important later on when we'll talk about
| | 02:12 |
other tools like the Overlap and Search tools.
| | 02:14 |
I move my cursor away and undo
back to my original position.
| | 02:19 |
Now I've got these pins fairly far
apart and you can move them individual and
| | 02:22 |
have some fun there, have him
kick and dance a little bit.
| | 02:24 |
Do little bit of a stretch and squash
animation, but you can also control finer
| | 02:30 |
appendages by placing pins closer together.
| | 02:33 |
For example, say I wanted this pin or
crayon that have some character of its own.
| | 02:37 |
I can go ahead and put a separate pin
at its end and bend just that pencil in
| | 02:43 |
relation to the wrist.
| | 02:45 |
Since I placed this original pin at a
point right where it's kind of touching
| | 02:48 |
the pin, it's pivoting around that wrist point;
| | 02:52 |
you can move multiple pins together.
| | 02:54 |
If I Shift+Click these two pins I can
now move them as a unit in relation to the
| | 02:59 |
rest of the character.
| | 03:00 |
Most of the pixels in between them
might still get bent depending on how those
| | 03:04 |
meshes tugging on the overall shape,
we'll show you a cool tool later on called
| | 03:08 |
the Starch tool which can
help cure some of those issues.
| | 03:11 |
Anyway I'm going to undo back to where
I just have these pins in his feet, his
| | 03:16 |
wrist, his pencil, and optionally this one
in the middle of the Torso, and do a save.
| | 03:23 |
By doing so I've saved a project with
these pins in the right place, and I'm
| | 03:27 |
free to go ahead and experiment.
| | 03:28 |
And you should go ahead and
have a little bit of fun right now.
| | 03:30 |
Set additional pins in places like say
the top of the hat to bend them around with.
| | 03:35 |
May be one in his beard and bend him
there as well to create some additional
| | 03:39 |
poses, and in general just have fun
moving the character around and getting a
| | 03:43 |
feel for how pins work.
| | 03:45 |
Remember you can select multiple
pins and move them as a group as well.
| | 03:48 |
But when you're done revert back to at
version of the character, and the pins in
| | 03:54 |
the feet, wrist, and pencil, because
these are the ones we're going to use in
| | 03:59 |
the next movie to start animating our character.
| | 04:12 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Keyframing a puppet animation| 00:07 |
You should be in a state where your
character has pins in his feet, his wrist,
| | 00:12 |
and at the top of the pencil.
| | 00:13 |
It's okay if you have set pins,
say, in the middle of his torso.
| | 00:16 |
When you're done setting your pins and
you're ready to animate, you might find
| | 00:19 |
it easier to revert
back to the Selection tool.
| | 00:22 |
That will clean up the display a little bit,
and particularly, you won't see the mesh anymore.
| | 00:26 |
If you are not seeing your pins at all,
remember, Puppet is an effect and you
| | 00:30 |
need to select an effect to see
its special user interface items.
| | 00:34 |
Now the Puppet tool is unique and
that as soon as you create a pin, After
| | 00:39 |
Effects will create the first keyframe for you.
| | 00:42 |
You don't need to set the animation
stopwatch, and to show this, I'll press U,
| | 00:46 |
which reveals all animating properties
on the timeline, and you'll see I now
| | 00:50 |
have my five pins that I post in this
character feet, wrist, pencil, and torso
| | 00:56 |
with animation stopwatch
already set and initial keyframes set.
| | 01:01 |
You can do a lot of work without ever
revealing these pins down in the Timeline panel.
| | 01:05 |
However, it's not a bad idea to
name them to keep track of them.
| | 01:08 |
As soon as you select one in the
timeline, you'll also see it appears selected
| | 01:12 |
in the Comp panel or selected in the
Comp panel will select it in the Timeline.
| | 01:16 |
I'll go ahead and rename my
pin just to keep them straight.
| | 01:19 |
I'll select it, press Return and type in
its name such as wrist. Select this one;
| | 01:27 |
I see that's the tip of the
pencil, so I'll say pencil.
| | 01:31 |
Select torso, left foot, my
left his right, and right foot.
| | 01:42 |
Now your Timeline panel will quickly
fill up with loads of puppet pins each with
| | 01:47 |
their own keyframes.
| | 01:48 |
If you want to simplify the display,
you can select just the pin you're
| | 01:52 |
interested in and type SS, two Ss in
quick succession for solo selected.
| | 01:58 |
That will show you just the pin that
was selected, then you can twirl it open
| | 02:02 |
to see its keyframes.
| | 02:03 |
But I am going to go ahead and press U
to reveal all the keyframes so we can
| | 02:06 |
see what's going on.
| | 02:08 |
This composition is just one second long.
| | 02:10 |
If you have an extended keyboard, hold
Shift and press Page Down to move ten
| | 02:15 |
frames ahead in time or just drag your
current time indicator to ten frames.
| | 02:19 |
Grab the tip of your pencil
and bend it over a little bit.
| | 02:24 |
In doing so, you'll see a
motion path appear in the Comp panel.
| | 02:28 |
This is just like the motion
you are used to for layers.
| | 02:31 |
I'll zoom in on it and re-center,
there's dots along it to show the position of
| | 02:38 |
that pin on each frame of your
composition, and you also have Bezier handles.
| | 02:45 |
Initially, they are just solid dots
because they are auto-Bezier, but as soon as
| | 02:48 |
you click it and drag, you'll now have
your continuous Bezier handles, you can
| | 02:52 |
drag out just like a motion path.
| | 02:54 |
I'll move back in time and you'll see how
the end of that pencil follows that path.
| | 02:59 |
By the way, did you notice
these little red artifacts here?
| | 03:03 |
Those are tips of the pencil being
left behind, and this is a side-effect of
| | 03:08 |
having the Mesh Expansion set to Small.
| | 03:11 |
Well, don't worry, that's
easy to fix after the fact.
| | 03:14 |
Select any of the Puppet Pin tools,
you'll see your parameters again for
| | 03:19 |
expansion and number of triangles and
just increase the expansion to, say, 2.
| | 03:25 |
In doing so, expansion now picks up
that anti-aliased edge around the end of
| | 03:29 |
this pencil and we no longer have artifacts.
| | 03:31 |
The other solution would be just
increasing the number of triangles until you
| | 03:34 |
get a fine enough line that would
pick up those bends anyway, but the more
| | 03:38 |
triangles you have, the
slower this is going to be.
| | 03:41 |
Anyway, I am going to go back to my
Selection tool, just so I have a nice, clean
| | 03:44 |
display, and if I Shift+Forward Slash
(/) to go back to 100% and you'll notice,
| | 03:49 |
by the way, down in the Timeline panel
that you have a keyframe for that pencil,
| | 03:53 |
but no other keyframes have been created.
| | 03:55 |
This is not like an Auto Keyframe mode where
keyframes get created for all your properties.
| | 04:00 |
From this point on, after your initial
setting of a puppet pin, new keyframes
| | 04:05 |
will be created only when
you move one of those pins.
| | 04:08 |
Speaking of moving pins, press End
to go to the end of the composition.
| | 04:12 |
I already have the end of my pencils selected;
| | 04:15 |
it's a solid yellow rather
than a hollow yellow dot.
| | 04:18 |
I am going to hold Shift, click on my
wrist pin as well, so they are both selected.
| | 04:22 |
You can go ahead and move multiple pins
at the same time such as like this, and
| | 04:27 |
in doing so, you'll see I get new
keyframes for the pencil and for the wrist.
| | 04:31 |
I am going to press 0 in numeric
keypad to RAM preview and there is my
| | 04:36 |
animation, where the pencil end
bends down, and then the pencil and the
| | 04:41 |
wrist move together.
| | 04:44 |
I'll Shift+click to deselect the
wrist pin, now I have just the path of the
| | 04:47 |
pencil tip and again, it's a Bezier
path where I can pick up and move these
| | 04:51 |
individual keyframes and I can also
pull out handles to decide how I want to
| | 04:57 |
bend this path around.
| | 04:59 |
If I have trouble seeing a handle, I can
hold the Command and Option keys on Mac
| | 05:03 |
or Ctrl and Alt keys on Windows, get
the Change Direction tool, you maybe
| | 05:07 |
familiar with from motion paths and
masking, and drag out a handle to go ahead
| | 05:11 |
and modify my path, maybe make
it bend around a bit like that.
| | 05:16 |
So that's how the end of the pencil is
moving, select the wrist, and maybe give
| | 05:21 |
it some character as well.
| | 05:22 |
I have it bend out a little bit
like that into an arc to create a more
| | 05:27 |
complex fluid animation.
| | 05:32 |
That's the basics of animating puppet pins.
| | 05:36 |
If you don't see these paths,
you may have the layer unselected.
| | 05:38 |
Make sure puppet is selected and
select the pin to see its path.
| | 05:43 |
And note that you are seeing
these in the Composition panel.
| | 05:46 |
With most effects, you need to double-
click a layer and open its Layer panel to
| | 05:50 |
see effect point motion paths.
| | 05:53 |
In the case of puppet, you can do all
your work right here in the Comp panel.
| | 05:55 |
Now that you know the basics, go
into the Comps_finished folder and open
| | 05:59 |
up 04-Puppet_final.
| | 06:02 |
Here I have created additional deform
pins for the top of the hat, neck, both
| | 06:08 |
ends of the pencil, the ankles, and
even the right arm, and create a lot of fun
| | 06:12 |
animations for these various points.
| | 06:14 |
I'll RAM preview, and now we have a much
more expressive animation for our character.
| | 06:19 |
Go ahead, have fun, create your own
animation's character, and then in the next
| | 06:23 |
movie, we'll show you how to take
advantage of motion sketch to create even
| | 06:26 |
more organic movements.
| | 06:40 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Motion-sketching an animation| 00:07 | Next, let's try our hand at creating
more organic movements for our Puppet
| | 00:11 | Pin animated character.
| | 00:12 | If you have access to the Exercise Files,
go to the Comps folder and in this is
| | 00:17 | case open up the Comp 06-Puppet-sketch*starter.
| | 00:20 | This a little bit out of order
compared to the After Effects Apprentice book,
| | 00:23 | but I figure as long as we are
animating, let's keep the groove going.
| | 00:26 | Double click it to open it.
| | 00:27 | Make sure that Puppet Effect or Mesh 1
underneath Puppet are selected, so I can
| | 00:31 | see my user interface in the Comp panel
and I've that pins on his-- I guess you
| | 00:35 | would call those his knees and his
wrist where it connects to the pencil.
| | 00:38 | You already know when you see this four-
direction arrow on the cursor that you
| | 00:42 | can go ahead and drag and move it around.
| | 00:44 | If you were point later in time then
when you originally created the pins, you
| | 00:49 | will get an additional animation keyframe.
| | 00:51 | But in this case, I am going to undo
to get rid of that keyframe, move my
| | 00:55 | Current Time Indicator, back to the
start of my composition, and explore using a
| | 01:00 | motion sketch to create these animation paths.
| | 01:03 | Now back in the After Effects Apprentice
lesson on Advanced Animation, we showed
| | 01:07 | you how to use Motion Sketch to draw a
motion path for a layer using your mouse
| | 01:13 | or a pen and tablet.
| | 01:14 | Well, you can do the same thing for Puppet Pins.
| | 01:17 | Select your Puppet Pin tool to bring up
its additional options and click on the
| | 01:22 | text for Record Options.
| | 01:25 | Here it will give you instructions to
hold down the Command key on Mac or Ctrl
| | 01:29 | key on Windows while dragging
a pin to record the animation.
| | 01:33 | The default Speed is 100% which says
basically record in real-time just as fast
| | 01:37 | as you're dragging and
the Smoothing is set to 10.
| | 01:40 | Now again if you've been through that
Advanced Animation course, you know that
| | 01:43 | Smoothing simplifies your motion path
by removing keyframes and automatically
| | 01:48 | bending out Bezier handles to
approximate the path you drew, but we prefer to
| | 01:52 | do our own smoothing.
| | 01:53 | So I will just set this down to either
0 or 1 so I have a lot of detail on my
| | 01:57 | path and I can always smooth this later.
| | 02:00 | Used Draft Deformation shows me what my
character is doing while I am dragging.
| | 02:03 | That's pretty good.
| | 02:04 | But I am going to leave Show Mesh off,
because I find that mesh can be a bit
| | 02:08 | visually confusing when I want to
focus on the pixels underneath that mesh.
| | 02:12 | With these options selected, I'll
click OK, hold Command on Mac or Ctrl on
| | 02:17 | Windows. My cursor changes to a
stopwatch as soon as I get it near a pin.
| | 02:22 | Recording has not started yet
until I actually click-and-drag.
| | 02:26 | So I wait until I've decided what I am
going to do and click-and-drag and you
| | 02:29 | will see the Time Indicator run through
my Timeline and there are my Puppet Pin
| | 02:34 | keyframes in the Timeline and in the Comp panel.
| | 02:38 | I will drag the Current Time Indicator
through and you can see the arm follow
| | 02:42 | this path around and I will RAM
preview it and there is animation.
| | 02:50 | If I don't like the animation, I can
just undo, make sure my Time Indicator
| | 02:54 | is back at the start, maybe change my
Record Options to say only record at 50% speed.
| | 02:59 | In other words, time will run slow,
I don't need to draw as fast. Enter.
| | 03:05 | Hold Command or Ctrl, stopwatch, click-and-drag.
| | 03:07 | Now I can create a more leisurely
detailed movement because time moved
| | 03:13 | slower inside my Timeline.
| | 03:15 | Now these are just normal keyframes.
| | 03:17 | You can do everything with them that
you could do with motion path keyframes.
| | 03:21 | For example, if they're are all
selected like this, I can hold Option on Mac or
| | 03:25 | Alt on Windows, click on the first or
last keyframe, and stretch them all out in
| | 03:31 | time to maybe fill my entire composition.
| | 03:33 | If I find this path is too detailed, too
many individual Bezier handles to edit,
| | 03:39 | if I want to change the path, I will go
up to Window, select Smoother, drag this
| | 03:45 | panel close to my Timeline, just make
it easier to see, and with my Puppet Pin
| | 03:49 | Deform keyframes selected, set the
Tolerance to say 5 and click Apply.
| | 03:56 | Now I have a simplified path.
| | 03:57 | If I wanted even more simplified, I
will undo, put in a higher number like
| | 04:01 | 8, then click Apply.
| | 04:04 | Now I have far fewer keyframes to manage.
| | 04:07 | There is my animation path and if I
decide that for example, this bend is
| | 04:10 | too tight, I will Shift+click to deselect this
keyframe, then click normally to select just it.
| | 04:15 | Now I can move these keyframes around,
bend the path to give it a truly one
| | 04:22 | tolerance character, maybe pull this
in here a little bit, smooth that out,
| | 04:26 | or even just delete a keyframe, pull out a
Bezier handle, and smooth out the path that way.
| | 04:32 | RAM preview again and there
is my new puppet animation.
| | 04:36 | Now in this case, I probably wanted to
have some additional pins to anchor him
| | 04:40 | so he is not going quite as crazy,
but it gives you an idea of what to do.
| | 04:44 | And by the way, the Puppet tool
does indeed respond to Motion Blur.
| | 04:48 | So I will turn on the Motion Blur switch for
this layer, turn it on for the composition.
| | 04:54 | You see this pencil already
started to blur out a little bit.
| | 04:57 | Q for RAM preview, it will take longer
to calculate, because now After Effects
| | 05:01 | has to calculate all these in-between frames.
| | 05:06 | You can see the arm really
stretching out and being blurred.
| | 05:11 | And there is the animation.
| | 05:12 | Again that looks even smoother and more organic.
| | 05:15 | So the nice thing about using this
ability to record pin movements, is you're
| | 05:19 | going to end up with complex or more
organic or natural movements than you
| | 05:22 | probably could creating individual
keyframes at specific points in time.
| | 05:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The Puppet Overlap tool| 00:07 |
I am going to quickly clean up my
display by closing the Smoother panel and if
| | 00:11 |
you like, you could go ahead and Close
All to close your other compositions.
| | 00:15 |
There are two more Puppet Pin
tools we haven't experimented with yet.
| | 00:19 |
One is called the Overlap tool.
| | 00:21 |
So if you have the files, go to
the Comps folder and double-click
| | 00:23 |
05-Puppet-overlap*starter.
| | 00:26 |
I'll click the Puppet effect to see
my pins inside the User Interface
| | 00:30 |
panel and I'll show you a little
bit of a problem with Puppet tool.
| | 00:33 |
Initially, this is flat artwork and
After Effects does not know if any of these
| | 00:39 |
pixels are supposed to be in
front or behind other pixels.
| | 00:43 |
For example, if grab his pencil and
drag it upwards, you will see that it
| | 00:48 |
crosses his neck, but if I drag it
downwards, you will see it actually goes
| | 00:53 |
behind his hip and leg.
| | 00:55 |
Well, what if I wanted the opposite, what
if I wanted to pass in front of his hip here?
| | 01:00 |
To do so, I need to give sections of
this mesh priority in terms of how in front
| | 01:04 |
or how behind those pixels should be.
| | 01:06 |
I am going to undo to get back to my
original position and just to cut down some
| | 01:10 |
of these odd distortion, I am going to
select my Puppet Pin tool and add another
| | 01:15 |
Puppet Pin, right here at his bowtie,
just to go ahead and cut down on the
| | 01:19 |
amount of distortion, while I am
trying to do this bending and overlapping.
| | 01:22 |
Now I am going to go back up to the
Puppet tool and select the Puppet Overlap tool.
| | 01:28 |
This is how I set those in
front or behind priorities.
| | 01:31 |
Puppet Overlap pins are completely
different than the animation pins you have
| | 01:35 |
been creating so far.
| | 01:37 |
So to set priorities, you basically
need to create a brand-new set of pins.
| | 01:42 |
After Effects is showing me the outline
of the original undistorted character.
| | 01:46 |
Again, After Effects freezes the mesh
based on the outline when you create
| | 01:51 |
your first pin, that's why it's
showing me this for reference and I need to
| | 01:54 |
place my Overlap pins inside this
original outline, not wherever the character
| | 01:59 |
is distorted to now.
| | 02:00 |
In this case, I'll place it
in the middle of this pencil.
| | 02:04 |
I'll click once and you will see a
section of it has turned light white.
| | 02:09 |
Basically, those triangles of my mesh have been
given an In Front priority, in this case 50%.
| | 02:17 |
If you've not set any Overlap pins,
After Effects assumes that all of the mesh
| | 02:21 |
triangles are priority zero.
| | 02:23 |
So by making something in front 50%
that means those pixels or mesh triangles
| | 02:29 |
should be in front of those that are zero.
| | 02:31 |
However, only those mesh triangles that
are highlighted, get this overlap value.
| | 02:37 |
To make sure the entire pencil as well
as his arm all get the same priority,
| | 02:42 |
don't go creating more pins.
| | 02:44 |
That creates an unnecessary amount of work.
| | 02:46 |
I am going to undo, back to my
original pin, make sure it's selected and
| | 02:52 |
scrub its Extent value.
| | 02:53 |
I am going to do so until the
whole arm and pencil are encased.
| | 02:59 |
If I have a little bit trouble where
it's creeping into his body one place, but
| | 03:02 |
not the other, you can actually move
these pins after the fact and see what
| | 03:06 |
influence that has on the
position of the Overlap pins.
| | 03:10 |
I am going to go ahead back this off
to were its just the arm and none of the body.
| | 03:14 |
I am going to return to the Selection
tool to clean up my user interface and see
| | 03:19 |
just the rendered results.
| | 03:21 |
I still passed in front of the upper
body like I did before, but now I passed in
| | 03:26 |
front of the hips and legs which is a
change over the way it behaved before.
| | 03:30 |
And again so you can see the difference,
I am going to put the pencil, in front
| | 03:34 |
of his thigh, go into the Timeline to
the Overlap pins, twirl that open, twirl
| | 03:40 |
open Overlap 1 and change the In Front value.
| | 03:45 |
If I change it to a negative value, less
than zero, you will see that pencil and
| | 03:49 |
arm have popped behind his hips.
| | 03:52 |
I drag it to a positive value, it pops in front.
| | 03:55 |
If my extent was too small, you will
see that I lose parts of the arm and
| | 03:59 |
pencil behind his body.
| | 04:01 |
That's why we had it set to the entire
length of the arm and pencil, so that
| | 04:05 |
all of those triangles inside the mesh
would now be rendered in front of those
| | 04:09 |
with priority zero.
| | 04:10 |
You can create multiple pins.
| | 04:12 |
For example, I'll drag this arm to where
it's now overlapping the bowtie as well.
| | 04:17 |
Let's say I want the bowtie to come in
front of the arm, but I don't want to
| | 04:21 |
change the arm's behavior where it
comes in front of other parts of the body.
| | 04:25 |
Well to do that, I can give
the bowtie its own overlap pins.
| | 04:29 |
I'll reselect the Puppet Overlap tool,
look for the outline of the original
| | 04:34 |
shape, click somewhere in
the middle of the bowtie.
| | 04:37 |
I see that the last value for extent
that I set is actually a bit too big, it's
| | 04:41 |
covering a part of his body
as well and I back that down.
| | 04:45 |
I see that I am losing
part of the tip of his bowtie.
| | 04:48 |
I'll just pick up and move that pin, so it's
more centered and balance the Extent value.
| | 04:55 |
What if I decided the tie
should be behind the arm after all?
| | 04:58 |
Well, I just need to change its Overlap value.
| | 05:01 |
The arm's In Front value is 20%, so I
need to set the Overlap value for the
| | 05:07 |
bowtie to say 10% and as soon as I
do so, you will see the tie has now
| | 05:12 |
popped behind the arm.
| | 05:14 |
I am going to back to Selection
tool so this renders more cleanly.
| | 05:18 |
Pen comes in front of the body,
still goes in front of the thigh as well.
| | 05:22 |
By setting up overlap regions on
different parts of a character and animating
| | 05:26 |
the In Front values, you can go ahead
and make different appendages pop in front
| | 05:31 |
of or behind the rest of the body.
| | 05:33 |
For example, you might go ahead and
swing once in front of the body, animate
| | 05:38 |
back out here, reduce the In Front
value and have it swing behind the body,
| | 05:44 |
come back out again.
| | 05:45 |
So the Overlap tool is really handy to
create a lot more complex interaction
| | 05:49 |
inside one individual flat
layer incased by the puppet's mesh.
| | 06:04 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The Puppet Starch tool| 00:07 |
The last puppet tool I'd like
to show you is the Starch tool.
| | 00:11 |
To do that I'm going to open up the
Comp 07-Puppet-starch*starter, I'm going to
| | 00:17 |
select the Puppet effect to make sure
I can see my pins, and in this case in
| | 00:21 |
addition to the pins around the ankles,
you notice that I put pins on the ends
| | 00:25 |
of the bowtie as well as
in the middle of his body.
| | 00:28 |
As I grab one of these pins at the end
of the bowtie and start pulling keep an
| | 00:32 |
eye on his neck, you'll see that some
strange kinks start to appear where the
| | 00:37 |
bowtie enters the body and that might
be even more apparent if I select the
| | 00:41 |
Puppet Pin tool and show the Mesh. I'll
zoom in and you can see how this central
| | 00:49 |
Mesh triangle is being pulled out and
causing distortion along the edges of
| | 00:54 |
these triangles, you can try increasing
the Triangle count to see if that helps,
| | 00:58 |
I'll go up to a thousand here.
| | 01:00 |
You can see it obviously took longer to
render and we did get a slight improvement
| | 01:06 |
but we're pretty much at the mercy of
how these triangles are being formed and
| | 01:10 |
following around this body.
| | 01:12 |
I am going to undo back to my lower
value and this I'd show you a better
| | 01:16 |
solution, the Starch tool.
| | 01:18 |
I'm going to change the Puppet tool to
Starch just like with the Overlap tool,
| | 01:24 |
I'll get an outline of the body in its
original form, because starch pins need
| | 01:29 |
to be applied along the original
shape not the now deformed shape.
| | 01:33 |
I'm having trouble through this section of
the body with the neck and the bowtie intersect.
| | 01:38 |
Even though I have a pin here already
I need to add a brand-new Starch Pin in
| | 01:43 |
order to correct this part of the body,
so I'll click once and immediately
| | 01:47 |
you'll see that the curvature of the
neck has gotten much better, let me show
| | 01:51 |
the Mesh to give better idea of what's going on.
| | 01:54 |
I didn't make a great placement of my
Starch Pin to begin with, it is getting
| | 01:58 |
a little bit of the bowtie, I need
to move my cursor until I see that
| | 02:02 |
four-headed move arrow again.
| | 02:04 |
Now I'll position it back over
this section towards a little bit more
| | 02:08 |
centered in the body.
| | 02:09 |
Now you'll see I have a little bit less
bend and an even smoother line for the
| | 02:13 |
neck, just like with overlap you
have Starch Extent and Starch Amount.
| | 02:18 |
Now it might be easier to see what's
going on actually if I return to the
| | 02:21 |
Selection tool and don't
have the Mesh in the way.
| | 02:24 |
Down in the Timeline panel I'll
twirl-up my Deform Pin and reveal my
| | 02:29 |
Stiffness Pin for my starch.
| | 02:31 |
If I set the Starch Amount down to 0,
you'll see our kinks reappear in the neck.
| | 02:37 |
However, as soon as I increase my
Starch up to a moderate value like 15 or 20,
| | 02:41 |
you'll see the neck straighten out,
but right now just a small portion of the
| | 02:46 |
neck is being starched.
| | 02:48 |
If I decrease the Extent fewer
Mesh triangles will be starched.
| | 02:53 |
Now I'll get some of my kinks
back again, that's not what I want.
| | 02:57 |
I can increase my Extent to a larger
value to now where more of the neck will be
| | 03:01 |
kept stiff. But even though I have a
nice line to the neck here by selecting on
| | 03:07 |
my Starch tool again, you'll see my
Extents have now gone out to include part of
| | 03:10 |
the bowtie and it's starting to be torn apart.
| | 03:12 |
So I pull in my Extents a little bit
until just the area I want stiff does
| | 03:17 |
indeed get starched. I'll go
back to the Selection tool.
| | 03:21 |
Of Course you can add more then one Starch Pin.
| | 03:24 |
If I indeed wanted to keep more of
this neck solid, but not affect how the
| | 03:28 |
bowtie is being stretched I can go
back to my Starch tool, place additional
| | 03:32 |
starch pins say here, and here, move
it down a little bit to join these areas
| | 03:40 |
together, and I can see how the neck
is kept more stiff to this part of the
| | 03:45 |
distortion. I'll go back to my Selection
tool, so you can see that more cleanly.
| | 03:48 |
I'll press Shift+/ to go
back to normal magnification.
| | 03:52 |
Since Starch tool is a handy corrective
item when you are getting kinks in your
| | 03:57 |
distortions, that's a lot more render-
efficient and then just increasing the
| | 04:00 |
number of triangles in the Mesh, but
you can also use this an animation tool if
| | 04:04 |
something is supposed to have a bone and
not supposed to bend, like say the main
| | 04:07 |
portion of his body, you could starch
the whole body and keep it as a rigid
| | 04:10 |
object and just bend the arms,
the feet, the bowtie, and the neck.
| | 04:14 |
So that's the Puppet tool, it is a
lot of fun to play with, increase some
| | 04:19 |
interesting animations with it. Here I'm
using it to do character animation, but
| | 04:23 |
you can also use it to bring life
to say text, logos or other objects.
| | 04:27 |
It's certainly not something you're
going to use on every job, but it is another
| | 04:31 |
way of creating fun animations.
| | 04:33 |
Now that I'm done I am going to go up to
my Comp panel and Close All, so that my
| | 04:38 |
display will be ready for the next chapter.
| | 04:51 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Deforming multiple shapes| 00:07 | I'd like to share with you a few more tricks
and issues of using the Puppet Pin tool
| | 00:11 | with layers that have complex Alpha channels.
| | 00:13 | I've closed my other compositions
and if you have access to the Exercise Files,
| | 00:18 | open up 08-Multiple Shapes*starter.
| | 00:22 | This line of text has what I would
refer to ask a complex alpha.
| | 00:26 | I'll turn on the Transparency grid
so that you can picture it better.
| | 00:30 | Each character has its own Alpha
separated from the other characters.
| | 00:35 | Also the letter "i" has separate Alphas defining
the dot on the top and the body of the "i".
| | 00:40 | When you select a layer and then select
the Puppet Pin tool, and I'm going
| | 00:47 | to make sure the Mesh is turned on so
you can see it, and use the default
| | 00:51 | for Expansion and Triangles.
| | 00:53 | After Effects only looks at the Alpha channel
enclosed by where you click.
| | 00:58 | It does not search for any other little
snippets of Alpha channel that might exist
| | 01:02 | elsewhere on that layer.
| | 01:04 | Therefore, when I click the inside
of the "r" only the "r" got the mesh.
| | 01:10 | This sort of isolation can be a good thing or
a bad thing, depending on what you intend to do.
| | 01:15 | Now another interesting thing about Puppet
is the way that it renders
| | 01:18 | the pixels that it deforms.
| | 01:20 | Remember Puppet is an effect.
| | 01:22 | If I go ahead and open up the Effect Controls
panel for this text layer,
| | 01:27 | you'll see I already have a Ramp and
a Bevel Alpha effect applied followed by Puppet.
| | 01:33 | If I click on one of these puppet pins
and start dragging this character so that
| | 01:39 | it overlaps, portions of the other unmeshed
characters, and turn off the mesh for now,
| | 01:45 | you'll see that the Ramp has been rendered,
the Bevel has been rendered
| | 01:51 | then the shape has been deformed
by the Puppet effect.
| | 01:54 | If the Puppet effect appeared before
these other effects, you would
| | 01:59 | have a deformed shape for the "r" then the
whole layer we get a Ramp and a Bevel Alpha.
| | 02:05 | So if you're working with complex alphas
like this and you're not quite getting
| | 02:08 | the definition between shapes that you'd
hope for, watch your effects stacking
| | 02:11 | order over in the Effects Control panel
and I'm going to undo to get this "r"
| | 02:16 | back in this un-deformed position.
| | 02:18 | There is a problem with this auto-meshing
procedure if you want to deform
| | 02:23 | an object that has multiple pieces
of alpha, for example, this "i."
| | 02:27 | If I was to click on the bottom of the "i"
and turn on my mesh again,
| | 02:32 | you'll see only the body of the "i"
got the mesh, not the dot up top.
| | 02:36 | If I'm going to stretch one against
the other, clicking on one point
| | 02:41 | and stretching doesn't really work.
| | 02:43 | It becomes separated because
they're two separate meshed objects.
| | 02:46 | I'll undo, click on the top of the "i"
and I'm stretching just the "i"
| | 02:52 | but not the dot on top.
| | 02:53 | Well, there is a way around that to group
pieces of Alpha channels on layers,
| | 02:59 | and undo to get back to my unmeshed state
for the "i" and then I'm going
| | 03:04 | to choose the Masking tools.
| | 03:07 | A trick with the Puppet Pin tool is to enclose
a portion of your layer inside a mask.
| | 03:15 | Once you've done that, you can then click
with the Puppet Pin tool
| | 03:20 | somewhere inside the mask
but outside the alpha of the character.
| | 03:24 | When you do that, After Effects will
create a mesh out of the masked shape,
| | 03:30 | not the Alpha channel for the object
you have clicked inside.
| | 03:32 | Just go ahead and add a couple more pins here
and now I can go ahead
| | 03:38 | and move that "i" as a group.
| | 03:39 | You might be saying, "But Chris, what about
my other pieces to this layer?" No problem.
| | 03:46 | Go to your Masks in the Timeline panel
and change its mode to None,
| | 03:52 | that means don't actually cut out
the visible pixels in this layer.
| | 03:57 | And now I've got my deformable "i."
| | 03:59 | I'll click my Puppet effect again,
and I can start bending these
| | 04:04 | around the other characters.
| | 04:05 | Notice it goes in front of
the "m" and behind the "r."
| | 04:08 | Unlike a normal mesh, you cannot use
the Overlap tool to make one mesh
| | 04:13 | go in front of another.
| | 04:14 | Instead you have to reorder
the meshes in the Timeline panel.
| | 04:17 | Let's say you wanted to bend this entire word
as it though on a sheet of rubber,
| | 04:23 | rather than trying to bend
each character individually. No problem.
| | 04:26 | I'm going to delete my Puppet effect to
get back to my starting point and delete
| | 04:30 | the mask I created just for the "i"
and instead mask the entire word
| | 04:37 | or namely enclose it all inside the mask.
| | 04:39 | I'll switch to my Puppet Pin tool,
click inside the mask, not inside one
| | 04:46 | of the characters and now I will get a mesh
for my entire mask shape.
| | 04:52 | And I can have fun bending
the entire text as a unit.
| | 04:56 | And in this case, I might want to increase
my number of triangles to get a little bit
| | 05:01 | nicer resolution to my deformation.
| | 05:06 | And as you saw my previous example,
you can mix and match these techniques,
| | 05:10 | individual shapes or shapes enclosed
by masks even inside the same layer.
| | 05:15 | So with those few nuggets of knowledge,
how to manage your mesh,
| | 05:19 | and how to manage the effects stack,
| | 05:21 | you should be able to get even finer control
over your puppet distortions.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Idea CornerTeaching a puppet to write| 00:07 |
Quite often, the Comps_finished
folders supplied with our Exercise Files
| | 00:11 |
contains versions of these comps
that go a little bit further than it was
| | 00:14 |
covered in the book or in these movies.
| | 00:17 |
For example, I will open up 06-Puppet-sketch
_final and I will play back a RAM preview.
| | 00:24 |
In this case, not only are we
animating the pencil or pen that our MiroMan is
| | 00:28 |
holding, it is drawing on
characters to reflect the path that it drew.
| | 00:33 |
Let's see how we did that.
| | 00:34 |
I am going to turn off this
effect for now and recreate it.
| | 00:38 |
That effect is on something
called the Write On solid.
| | 00:41 |
I will turn off its visibility.
| | 00:42 |
Now you may remember from an earlier
movie in this lesson that you can motion
| | 00:47 |
sketch any of your Puppet Pins.
| | 00:49 |
I will select Puppet for the MiroMan,
temporarily select the Puppet Pin tool,
| | 00:55 |
hold down Command on Mac, Ctrl on
Windows and position my cursor over one of the
| | 00:59 |
pins until this little stopwatch appears.
| | 01:02 |
That indicates that now I can motion
sketch and After Effects will capture my
| | 01:05 |
movements in real-time.
| | 01:07 |
For this particular example, we
selected both the end of the pen, and
| | 01:11 |
Shift+selected the base of the pen and
sketched both of them together to keep
| | 01:15 |
the pencil together and then did one
sketch movement which basically kept these
| | 01:19 |
two aligned with each other.
| | 01:20 |
The result was a path for the pen that
resembled our handwriting of the letters ae.
| | 01:27 |
Once we have that path, we can copy and
paste that path to another path like parameter.
| | 01:32 |
So I will select the position keyframes
in the Timeline panel and Command+C or
| | 01:36 |
Ctrl+C to copy them.
| | 01:37 |
The next trick is using these position
keyframes for something that will stroke this path.
| | 01:42 |
Now, there is a stroke effect, but
there's something even better called
| | 01:45 |
the Write-on effect.
| | 01:47 |
Rather than apply Write-on, on top of the
puppet, we're going to give it his own layer.
| | 01:51 |
Now, these Puppet Pin positions
are relative to the layer itself.
| | 01:58 |
Therefore, we need to create a solid
that's as same size as our MiroMan here to
| | 02:03 |
then use for the Write-on effect, that
keeps their coordinate systems lined up.
| | 02:07 |
I am going to return to my Selection tool,
I am going to right click on MiroMan,
| | 02:11 |
and say Reveal layer Source in Project.
| | 02:15 |
It's selected down here.
| | 02:16 |
I can see at the very top it's 310x450
pixels and they have an aspect ratio of 1
| | 02:22 |
which means they're square pixels.
| | 02:23 |
So I'll come back to my composition, do
layer>New>Solid, change the size to 310
| | 02:30 |
wide, 450 tall, Square Pixels, Color
doesn't matter for now since we will make
| | 02:37 |
that transparent and click OK.
| | 02:39 |
Now that we have our solid, I will
drag my Write-on effect onto that solid
| | 02:44 |
and make sure my Current Time
Indicator is back at the start of my
| | 02:47 |
composition because when I paste
keyframes, they start at the location of the
| | 02:51 |
Current Time Indicator.
| | 02:52 |
My effect point parameter
is called Brush Position.
| | 02:57 |
I can see it has a little
cross hair and X and Y parameters.
| | 03:00 |
I need to select it and
paste my value into this.
| | 03:02 |
The easiest way to do that is to
enable keyframing for it, then type U which
| | 03:06 |
reveals animating
properties down in the Timeline.
| | 03:09 |
With that properties selected, I will
Command+V or Ctrl+V to paste and now
| | 03:13 |
I have my keyframes.
| | 03:15 |
However, it's kind of hard to see
what's going on because I have a white
| | 03:18 |
solid and a white color.
| | 03:19 |
I will change the Paint Style to On
Transparent and that way I will see just the
| | 03:26 |
drawing of this path.
| | 03:27 |
Now we have another problem to solve.
| | 03:31 |
I used Puppet to drag that pen beyond the
original boundaries of the MiroMan's layer.
| | 03:39 |
However, Write-on is currently
restricted to layer's dimensions.
| | 03:43 |
To get around that, there's this
wonderful utility plug-in called Grow Bounds.
| | 03:50 |
Grow Bounds will make the layer an effect is
applied to appear bigger than it really is.
| | 03:56 |
So I'll apply Grow Bounds, drag him
before Write-on and expand the number of
| | 04:04 |
pixels of this layer until I can
see my entire character like so.
| | 04:12 |
Now, I have got my a and e. Beyond that
it's a matter of working with Write-on's
| | 04:16 |
parameters to get a nicer hand drawing.
| | 04:17 |
For example, I'll play with Brush
Spacing to go ahead and make this a much more
| | 04:21 |
solid line and then I animated the
other properties to give myself some color
| | 04:25 |
and varying stroke thickness of this layer.
| | 04:28 |
Rather than go through the time
recreating those now, I am going to just turn
| | 04:31 |
this layer off, go back to my original
Write On solid, turn it on, type U to
| | 04:35 |
reveal its keyframes and you'll see
that I keyframed the color of the stroke to
| | 04:41 |
go between yellow and white as well as
the brush size to make it go thinner and
| | 04:49 |
thicker and we'll RAM preview
again. And there's our final animation.
| | 04:56 |
Now, we did further tweaking like after
we worked with Write-on, we realized the
| | 05:01 |
path needed a little bit more refinement.
| | 05:03 |
Unlike the puppet path which you can
edit in the Comp panel, any effect paths
| | 05:09 |
must be edited in the Layer panel.
| | 05:11 |
So you double click that layer, change
the View pop-up to Write-on and now you
| | 05:16 |
will see its path and there you can go
ahead and play with the Bezier handles as
| | 05:20 |
necessary to get a smoother path.
| | 05:23 |
Once you're happy with those position
keyframes, you can copy them, go back
| | 05:28 |
to the Puppet Pin, I will bring my
Comp panel forward again and re-paste your
| | 05:32 |
modified brush position path to make sure you
keep the pen in sync with what you're drawing.
| | 05:37 |
In this case I also see the path is
offset a couple of pixels from what I did
| | 05:41 |
with Write-on, that's okay.
| | 05:42 |
I will select all of keyframes,
carefully drag it back to where it appear to be
| | 05:47 |
more centered up, such as that.
| | 05:50 |
You know, you've become a good After
Effects artist and you've learned to start
| | 05:54 |
combining different skills that you've learned.
| | 05:57 |
For example, we're combining Puppet
tool animation with effects, with the
| | 06:02 |
ability to edit, copy and paste position
keyframes between different parameters.
| | 06:07 |
At the end of the day, After Effects
is just a giant toolbox where you get to
| | 06:10 |
assemble the parts the way that you
want towards your or your client's
| | 06:13 |
creative vision.
| | 06:26 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
