Quick Tip: Create a Piano Keyboard Ribbon Using 3D Effects

Version: Illustrator CS2 and aboveLevel: IntermediateLength: 3:32

In this Quick Tip you will learn a handy way to map artwork to a 3D stroke to make a flowing piano keyboard. Let’s begin!

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After Effects CS5 - Roto Brush

One of the additions to After Effects CS5 is their Roto Brush tool. This tool can be considered their short cut quick take for the tedious process of rotoscoping. How often we want to extract something or someone from our video, mix up the images from different videos. The Roto Brush tool offers a quick method with very impressive results for achieving this end!

After Effects CS5 also includes Mocha which is a much more ambitious tracking tool but for basic cut and isolating objects for special treatment you will like their Roto Brush tool. Pick a video that is a good candidate for you. Pick something that has an object you would like to isolate and for this exercise, and we will do something, something to separate its treatment from the rest of the video. You could change its color or apply a color effect like changing its hue but choose something that is easy to work with and an effect that is easy to distinguish.

There are many ways you can put the Roto Brush tool to work for you but we want, in this exercise, to highlight how it works so you can better understand the possibilities. Once you have created a composition with a short video, one with a nice candidate for isolation, make a copy of your video so you can apply this new effect to one copy. Think of this effect as a mask, a smarter moving mask depending on the area you define.

Double click your copy to bring it up in the layer window which is where you apply the brush effect. Looking at your tools menu, at the far right, just to the left of your puppet pin tool you will see the Roto Brush tool. It is easy to use and you basically just paint the interior of the object you want to isolate. In my case, I am wearing a black hat, I will brush the interior of the hat to 'choose' it.

As you begin to apply the brush, notice that dragging your mouse diagonally will adjust its size making the brush size larger and smaller for your choosing target. As you choose your object it will be highlighted with a pink outline showing you what will be included. Like many similar tools, this is using pixel relationships so as you make your choice you can zoom in and fine tune your selection. If you have some area you want to remove from your selection, holding 'alt' key will switch to a 'subtractive' mode letting you highlight what you want to remove.

Once you are pleased with the outline of your brush mask, notice the 'Freeze' button under the timeline in the layer panel. This will capture your selection. Also notice the number of frames you have chosen under the timeline. You can drag this selection to the right or left to increase the time presence of your mask.

With the selection and time frame you want, return to your composition window and we will apply something to our selection to illustrate how you can treat only the section you have captured with your Roto Brush exercise. Remember, we began by copying our video to have the original and one for applying this effect. In my case, I isolated my black hat, and back in the composition, applied the fill effect under the 'Generate Effects' to turn my hat red. With fill applied, now my black hat has turned to red for the duration of the time window I 'froze' in the layer panel. Make sure the layer you have applied your Roto Brush to, and the one you will apply this new effect to, is on top of the copied layer. You want this effect to stand out. It will only be applied to the area selected by your Roto Brush but will only appear if it is on top of the duplicate layer.

Like all effects that require more than understanding, the Roto Brush effect definitely requires a bit of practice. Choosing a 'likely candidate' with nice color and light definition to make it easy to distinguish your shape certainly helps a lot. With a little practice, this tool, new to CS5 can go a long way providing flexibility mixing up and especially applying special treatment to portions of your videos.

Inspire, think globally, act locally. Web Designer Tom Womack uses Adobe Creative Suite 5 and Cinema 4D 12.0 creating dynamic sites with rich media.

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After Effects and Illustrator - Let's Paint

After Effects paint tools are similar to Photoshop and Illustrator but in some very real ways they are quite peculiar to After Effects. For one thing, as you paint and create objects, you are at the same time creating a potential animation because simply creating objects with your paint tools offers the option of presenting your images in time.

One of the first things to note as you paint in After Effects is that while you do so much of your work in your composition window, adding and manipulating objects on your timeline, you 'Paint' on a layer and must be in the layer panel to begin painting. Like Photoshop and other graphics applications, you will probably begin by choosing a brush, a brush style and diameter. Choose a color and then, paint a little bit! Paint a scribble or spell 'Hello World', something easy and silly just to see how easy painting in your layer is.

The first way to begin animating your paint is with the start and end stroke options. Like all After Effects animations, click the stopwatch setting to create a keyframe, move down the timeline, change the 'start' or 'end' percentage value and this will create another keyframe.

It is that simple but... what are you doing? You are telling After Effects what portion of your shape has been drawn at that point, or more accurately where your start or end progress is in relationship to the beginning. This wasn't obvious for me and like most AE effects, when it's not perfectly clear, I play with the settings a bit, letting it sink in exactly how they are being applied. In the first experiments of grasping exactly how these settings behave, pick one object, a simple paint stroke or word spelled, and pick one setting to experiment with.

Draw an 's' curve with your brush. To see the most natural intuitive illustration of animating paint, under brush, stroke options you may set your 'start' and 'end' percentages. Set your timeline to the beginning of your composition. Note the default setting for start is 0% and end is 100%. It is by default, 'completely drawn' with ending set to 100%. Click your stopwatch to create a keyframe and change your end setting to 0%. Your paint object will disappear. It's end completion is now 0%. Now move down the timeline a few seconds and set it to 100% creating a second keyframe. This will completely draw your new paint object. Now execute your composition (enter 'home' to return to beginning, '0' on numeric keypad to play). You will see your paint object drawn on your composition panel appearing over the timeline you set.

Now here is a nice 'next step'. Let's animate your start setting instead. It's not really 'where' you start but more like what stage of progression, how far along you are on the 'start' to the 'end' of your drawing. This may be a bit confusing but set your stroke option 'end' to 100%, it is completely drawn. Now, at the beginning of your timeline, set your start to 0%. Move down the timeline a few seconds and set your start to 100%. As you scrub your timeline your will see your paint object drawn backwards! At the beginning of your timeline, your 'start' progress is at the end, the last pixels you created for this object. As you move in time, you move further into the 'start' progression, yet moving from where it was at 100% to 0%. When you reach your second keyframe, you will see your complete object but it will be animated in reverse. Pretty cool, if not a little bit confusing. Any behavior like this, any control that is something less than intuitive gets the same treatment from me. Play! Play with the behavior, experiment a bit, watch how it unfolds changing parameters to get intimate with how they control your animation behavior.

We will play with some of the other fun settings in paint, like 'write on', in our next paint tutorial.

Full Moons, Dogcreek, think globally, act locally.

Author Tom Womack is a Web Designer, nature lover, and environmentalist.
Living by Dog Creek in Kingston Springs, TN, much of his work is devoted to images borrowed from nature using Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro and other applications from the Adobe Design Suite, and much inspiration from Henry Thoreau.

http://www.webforu2.com/

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