It's way late and I should be in bed. However, this is one of those things that has been on my mind for too long and it's time has come.
In damn near every D-Map that I've done, there is primary motion and that motion is masked out where it's not wanted. I've laid out a big Bag o' Tricks for this kind of thing. One thing that I haven't really talked about is having more than one motion in a D-Map. In the following examples, there will be two different motions going on.
Here is the first:
Pretty simple and straight forward. Built for two different kinds of vertical motion. One side gets squished, and the other side gets expanded.
Let's try a slightly more complex example:
In that one, the primary motion is in the corners and the secondary is in the center. That is, the corners will be brought in towards the center and the center will be expanded outwards.
In the second example, it's just straight-forward Layer Masks. If you are up for it, try building it for yourself with the kind of tweakness that everybody loves. You know, Exclusion + Curves Ad-Layers + Clipping Groups. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out.
When doing things like this, another level of tweakness is added. Remember: you can adjust the Opacity of layers. Duh! Consider the second example for a moment. Let's say that you get the corner motion that you want using 20%/20%, but the center is expanding too much. No problem - just lower the Opacity. If you want the expansion lessened by 50%, then bring Opacity down to 50%. Or you could, as I said recently, scale the brightness with a Levels or Curves Ad-Layer. Either way is good.
Another thing that is good is Hard Light. Now, in the slightly more complex example, there isn't much overlap between the layers, so that makes it kind of a poor example for Hard Light. But Hard Light can provide a kind of :ahem: blending that Normal isn't condusive for.
Another thing, also mentioned recently, is that you can change a Set's blending mode and opacity. (You can also give a Set a Layer Mask. Non-tweakable as far as I know, but another thing to keep in mind.)
What does this mean? It means you can toss all sorts of different motions into a D-Map and blend them together in very cool ways - while keeping all of the different motions seperate with their own sets of tweaks! Because I'm such a weirdo, I once built a D-Map that does the exact same thing as Transform > Perspective - but with tweakness that Perspective doesn't have!
Man, that right there is some exciting stuff.
I think it's time to sneak into bed...
play.fiddle.learn
posted 08-18-2003 08:09
