Newbie wants to do some weird stuff...

[seebs]

Long story short: I want to make some animations which are synchronized with music, and which are animations of roughly what the music looks like to me (I'm mildly synaesthetic). This is pretty far from the sorts of things that I mostly see people talking about doing with stuff like animation studio. Couple specific things:

If I have an existing hunk of video, is there a reasonably sane way to embed it in an anime studio project? (I don't actually have this video yet, mind, but I might at some point). (EDIT: Nevermind, that'd be under import.)

Is there a way to apply color filters to things like images or video, say, tinting something yellow or blue or whatever? (EDIT: Sort of, at least, by using masking and having the thing I want to tint "add to mask" and then a thing in front of it set to "multiply".)

Is there a reasonably sane way to draw things like arcs? Which is to say, like the circle tool, but not all 360 degrees. (Ideally, with the ability to animate the angle being drawn.)

Obviously, the ability to import other videos would make it pretty easy to work around the arc thing, but one of the things I want to do is take advantage of the scripting controls, so the more stuff I am able to render directly inside AS, the better.

[slowtiger]

You found out most answers by yourself, that's great. You know that an imported video can be warped with bones the same way as an image? AS is really versatile in this.

Tinting some footage: create a solid rectangle in a deep colour, set its layer to multiply, adjust opacity. You got that.

Arcs: first draw a circle, then use the script "draw > split curves" to add more points. Then select the bottom half of all the points, select scale tool, enlarge and mirror the points vertically. Select translate tool and shift into position. Select corner points and adjust curvature. Result looks something like this:



This is good enough for most purposes. If I need something really exact I'd construct in Illustrator and import from that, but I try to avoid that.

[Víctor Paredes]

Don forget the curvature tool. It's a cool tool

[seebs]

Oooh, neat. That circle-flipping thing might well solve my problems.

As to the arc thing: I had been thinking in terms of a section going out from the center, but what you have there is interesting. I was messing with trying to edit points, and not successfully getting lines to be smoothly-curved between some points and sharply-cornered for others. And actually, now that I know how you did that, I can probably do all SORTS of cool stuff with it. I only have to get it to work once to make a movie of it that I can then use as a texture...

What's a curvature tool? Imagine that I wanted to make a thing which started as a vertical line and swept out over a period of frames until it was a full circle, is there a reasonable way to animate that?

[slowtiger]

The curvature tool (C) is applied to one ore more selected points, drag left and right to change the line from angle to curve (there have to be points around which are not in line to see the effect.) Yes, it's animateable.

Selgin again beats me with elegancy ...

[hayasidist]

there's also the Stroke Exposure tool to reveal (parts of) a curve.

if I need a "not that easy to draw if you're animating existing points" shape (e.g. a full screen person) as the target of an animation I draw this "end result" on frame 0 then on frame 1 I move the points to be the starting shape (e.g. a very tiny straight line) -- then getting to the end result is just a case of "reset all points". or if you want to do that in stages then do the "reset" (or copy and paste keyframe) and then shift points around to an intermediate shape as many times as you like at different points in the timeline ... I personally find it's easier to "destroy" a shape by moving points that to create it!

the lettering here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi5IQEFhLz0 and the shoots here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdH0069VKS4 were both done that way.


and you might find these drawing tools useful: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=19526&start=15 (newer version on the other forum)


welcome - and enjoy animating!