Along the manuals and tutorials, this forum was my go to place for any problem so I find normal to share. A few notes on this particular experience:
- I spent most of last night just pulling my hairs out about masking and could not find the solution. I had to create a magnifier which would show images in color while outside of it is in B&W. I duplicated my images group and put one on top of white with luminosity blend mode for the B&W (I welcome other ideas), and so on top I had to mask the colored group in the shape of a circle. So far so good, but of course, I wanted to add a minimum of reflection type shapes to make believe it's glass so I needed to add a new layer on top of that masked circle.There are some useful posts about this problem but still no real solution to have linked moving layers separated in a mask structure by other stuff. The only work around I read was to use bones. So here I am at 5 in the morning going back to frame 0 where everything is all over the place and camera movement drives you nuts (until you realize turning on the immune setting helps a great deal). So I created a smart bone for the size and the reflections, one bone to make the magnifier move and it got sorted out but what an ordeal.
- Next I felt my magnifier was lacking something: a bulge effect of course, to actually magnify, which is usually standard in more generalist programs and so I was a bit sad. And so I tried to rig my image group with bones on each sides to hold it in place and ran some tests on the behavior of a simple bone flexi-binded in the center. I concluded after an hour that there doesn't exist the possibility to just brush over images to distort them, the bone is always stuck wherever it is.
And so I told myself that if I make my magnifier follow a path, i could try to set up these kinds of complicated rigs I've seen here and there where bones interact with each other. I realized I 'm far from reaching that level as I wasn't even able to make the bone holding the magnifier to follow any path.
I gave up on making that bulge effect and went on animating the magnifier around the images. And yet I faced another hic-up. It seems the cmd key on my mac is ineffective with AS and so I couldn't modify the motion path. I definitely ruled out user error on that one. I had already noticed I cannot reorder shapes, use the jump to key shortcut and now this. I haven't finished troubleshooting and my wacom tablet could be the culpitr but if not, SmithMicro 's gotta look into it seriously. So i used more keyframes instead, which by the way I couldn't fine-tune in the motion graph since there are no bezier handles to be found. So either bezier handles are activated via cmd key which doesn't work, or motion graph is just there for decoration. I'd love some feedback on this if possible.
Render is done and so i'll return to it but thank you for taking the time to read this. As much a catharsis for me as a good example of the kind of work cessions users have to go through. It's all very fun and interesting and I can very well write a post about all the things I love about AS. Nevertheless, I mention several problems and unknowns here. Some of this things have stayed unsolved to me for years (yes, years). I admit sometimes asking silly questions on this forum, which I figure out after re-reading the documentation or browsing through the menus, and so at time's, silence from the veterans is indicated. However, the doc is by no mean flawless, and there are limitations to what the program can do or ways that are not that obvious (don't get me started on bones
). so I just want to say on behalf all the newbs and in-betweens to please be patient and keep helping us getting there, as you are most often doing, thankfully.
