aenhancers

Hi there,

Is it possible to displace a layer along the z-axis with a grayscale images
or alternatively, is it possible to to control the scale of a layer (ideally just the x-scale) with a grayscale image? any help is very much appreciated. many thanks,
Nino

Hi vranan,

I'm looking into something like this myself. Aiming to offset layers in time based on a greyscale/displacement layer.

The way I see this happenning is sampling a colour/greyscale value at a specific co-ordinate and feeding that value into an expression as a percentage of your offset. Apparently AE can't do this but Digital Anarchy can. Let me know if you have any break throughs and I'll let you know if I have any luck with DA.

jovial

hi jovial,

i think what you are trying to achieve can be done by trapcode particular.

set up a grid and for "Layer RGB usage" use the lightness velocity option.

a grayscale image can therefore drive your layers offset in z-space. hope it

makes sense

jovial wrote: Apparently AE can't do this but Digital Anarchy can. Let me know if you have any break throughs and I'll let you know if I have any luck with DA.

jovial

Yeah, it's possible with the color sampler, but it's still a pretty quirky setup since the color info needs to be baked first. Attempting this on a comp with more than 10 layers is potentailly foolish and futile as the overhead in extra work get's substantial.

Mylenium

vranan wrote:hi jovial,

i think what you are trying to achieve can be done by trapcode particular.

set up a grid and for "Layer RGB usage" use the lightness velocity option.

a grayscale image can therefore drive your layers offset in z-space. hope it

makes sense

Yes, that would be the way to go. Beware, though, you will get warnings if your layers are larger than a certain size and it may not work at all (because Particular can't sample the layers and runs out of memory).

Mylenium

hi Mylenium,

is it possible in trapcode particular to have your particles NOT facing the camera when rotating them let's say along the y-axis? i don't seem to find an option for that.
thanks for any help.....
Nino

vranan wrote:hi Mylenium,

is it possible in trapcode particular to have your particles NOT facing the camera when rotating them let's say along the y-axis? i don't seem to find an option for that.
thanks for any help.....
Nino

Nope. Particular will render its particles as sprites perpendicular to the screen projection. However, you can use "collapse transformations" - animate your particle in a sub-comp and then use that switch. It's slow and not totally correct as the particles will be sampled at their initial orientation (thus you cannot get correct 3D lighting), but better than nothing.

Mylenium

vranan,

There's a tutorial on a nice work-around for the particles-always-facing-the-camera issue here;

http://www.graymachine.com/tutorials/

Dan