Green Lantern effect

[winterman]

You know how the character of green lantern flies with a halo/nimbus of energy around his body and leaves a continuous trail of light behind him? I've been wracking my brains and i can't figure a way to do it. I'm using DEBUT 9 and AS 5 i think. Notions?

[hayasidist]

how about ...for a simple track across the screen...
on a vector layer draw all the glow along the whole path that the character flies
on another layer draw a box that covers all the path and use this as a reveal mask - on frame 1 set the control points behind the character so that there's no glow showing, and when the character moves animate the mask so that the leading edge is under the character as it flies stretching the visible area of the masking box and so revealing the glow.

if it's a more complex path you'll need more control points in the mask and you may need more than one pair of glow and mask layers -- and if you wanted the glow to fade, animate the trailing edge - no stroke / soft edge will work better

[willf]

Not sure about the halo, I know that the layer settings box will allow you to put an outline around the entire contents of, say, the bone layer, but don't know about a halo. There are settings on the style box that will give your shapes a soft edge or halo.

As far as the glowing trail goes, you could also try the reveal line feature, you could use it to create a glowing line that would trail along after the character. Or try the magic line or layer trail tools located under scripts/layer effects.

[winterman]

thanks very much. i'll try these.