Crafting custom shapes and masks

Now in this video we're going to take what we've learned about creating masks on layer solids and creating shape layers, and just sort of continue building by creating some complex masks and custom shape layers using the Pen tool. So to get started, let's look at our scene. On the left, we have the kinetECO logo with this neat sun effect in the upper left. Now on the right we have our yellow solid with a mask. Now what we're going to do is bring the sun into the corner of this area, and we'll do that by using more than one mask on this layer solid.

Go up the Rectangle tool and click and hold until you get to the Ellipse tool. Now I want to draw an ellipse in the upper left corner of our yellow solid. So if you click and drag, we can start creating an ellipse. Now after you start dragging, hold down Shift and that will keep that shape in proper proportion. As I'm overlapping these two shapes, I'm running into a problem. Well the first one is the fact that they're both filled with the exact same color, but the second one is the fact that they literally are both the same colors in terms of the mask.

What we need to do is make Mask 2 a little more high contrast from Mask 1 and to do that, if you go on the timeline, next to the word Mask 2 there's a yellow square. Go ahead and click on that, and change that yellow square to a blue square. Now when we click OK, having chosen blue, you can see we have a blue square and our path is now blue. Now whenever you have a path like this that is already selected, you can press V to grab your Selection tool and click on anyone of these vertices to move the path around.

I'm just trying to recreate this sort of sun layer over here, so I'll just use the previous one as a reference, and now it's time to go down to Layer 1, and see how we can adjust the interaction between these two masks. If you click on Mask 1 and click on Mask 2, you'll notice to the right we have pulldowns. If you click on the pulldown, you'll see we have options. If I chose None for Mask 2, notice there's nothing going on within this mask.

Now it's hard to tell whether or not it's doing anything with this layer above, because I have Add set for Mask 1. So if I say None for Mask 1 now all of a sudden you can see the entire layer solid. So let's change both of those back to Add and I want you to go to Mask 2 under the pulldown and choose Subtract and see what happens. If you are at all confused, it's easy to think of masks in terms of a math equation. So you could say Mask 1 added to the scene and Mask 2 is subtracted from the scene.

That way you can see the final answer is going to be Mask 1 minus Mask 2. If you click on the Mask 2 pulldown again and change it from Subtract to Intersect, sure enough Mask 1 gets added to the scene and Mask 2 will intersect with that, meaning anywhere it's intersecting, it's going to fill it in. So now that you understand how multiple masks on the same layers work, let's look at creating a custom shape using the Pen tool.

In order to make sure that I'm not adding yet another mask to Layer 1, let's collapse Layer 1 and just click anywhere off of the layer in the timeline. Now I want to add kind of some squiggly lines to appear around the outer side of the sun. So to do that let's grab the Pen tool up in our Tool panel, and look to the right for the different options for the Pen tool. The first thing I want you to pay attention to is all the way over to the right. That's the RotoBezier Option.

If yours is selected, I want you to deselect that. Basically, that gives a different set of controls to your Pen tool that are formatted for rotoscoping, which we're not going to get into. So just make sure that this is deselected, and then on the Fill option here, hold down the Alt key on the PC or Option on the Mac and click not once, not twice, but three times, till you cycle through and get No Fill. Now the Stroke I want to leave on there, but instead of it being 2 pixels, let's click on the number and change it to 6.

Now we've got our Pen tool ready to draw. I'm going to start maybe down here at this kind of 45-degree angle. Click and release to make the first point. Move your Pen tool off to the side and click and drag for your second point. When you click and drag, you'll get the Bezier handles. So let's move back up here and click and drag to make another point. And we'll go back here, click and drag, and now you can see I've kind of got this wavy shape.

It's not quite exactly what I was looking for, but I want to show you how we can tweak this. If you move your Pen tool back over anyone of these control vertices, you can click on one and then move it. I can click on the first one and then move it, so that's one way to move your vertices. If you can click on any of the handles, notice they're tied to the previous handle. Well if you hold down Option before you click on the handle, you'll get the Convert Vertex tool which will allow you to break the handle, so you could actually get a custom break over the Control Vertex.

So I'll just Command+Z to undo that last piece. All right, let's deselect all of our layers and look at what we've got. As you can see, we have a custom shape we created with compound masks, that's two masks on one layer solid, and we have a neat wiggly line we created using the Pen tool, creating a custom shape layer. So I hope you can see how flexible After Effects is between using compound masks and creating custom shapes with the Pen tool.