Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Claw Marks - After Effects

I was advised to try and put some claw marks down the tree as my dragon slides down. To me the easiest way to try and do this was in After Effects, as here I would be able to paint onto the video layer and know exactly where the dragon was travelling. There was a way to do it in Maya by animating a texture, but it was too hard to figure out where the dragon would be contacting the tree using a flat 2d texture. Within After Effects there is a paint tool, much like Photoshop you are also able to paint on layers and adjust these. The video below is what I created using the paint tool. It looks okay at the beginning, however I think because the dragon curves down and around the tree, the 'claw marks' end up looking out of place a bit. It would have worked better if they were broken up and weren't in one long line, but as he is sliding down the whole of the tree, it wouldn't make sense if the claw marks started and stopped at certain points. The other issue I had was the dragon and other objects passing behind the paint layers, I tried masking out the tree and changing the layer positions but this didn't seem to work. Right now I don't have the time to try and figure this out, but I'm going to look into it a bit more and try and create a better effect for the end of year show.

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