Friday, April 23, 2010

Invert Matte Step by Step

In response to Alex and Dee, here's the breakdown on how to apply the invert matte in the Glow FX to add an 'explosive' effect. Apply the following to your already existing scene set-up



Step 1. Create a new drawing layer ABOVE everything you want to affect and draw something. Anything - a brush stroke outside the camera view area will work. Add a GLOW effect to this new layer.

Step 2. Click on the GLOW layer to bring up the layer properties panel. make your blur RADIAL and make your Blur Radius 2 or 3. Tick 'Invert Matte'

Step 3. In the same panel play around with the color values, and push the alpha to a value of 255 for maximum effect (it's actually best to do this with the scene in render view, so you can see what you are doing, and how the effect is working)

Also - create keyframes to change the color values in the timeline for a 'flashing' explosive effect

And that's it. You can also us this process with the SHADOW effect layer to tint your entire scene

5 comments:

  1. That it? Cool thanks Eddie. Gotta try this.

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  2. I've tried this several times and I cannot get it to work at all. I must be missing something.

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  3. wait a minute, it worked this whole time! you just have to render and play, not as a SWF, to view the effect.

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  4. Good idea. It could also work with a white layer / colour card (in front of everything instead of back) connected to a "add" blending module and a transparency one to control the intensity. Still, animating the RGB and Alpha of the effect could be easier having only the Glow module instead of the blending, transparency and I don't remember wich one to transform the RGB of the layer.

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