animate a line???

J

J5 squared

Well-known member
So i'm attempting to make a ipod commercial rip off. I had a talent dance in front of a greenscreen. Now i need to put in an ipod and the cord. Is their a way to create a cord and animate it in AE?
 
That's quite a task that will require some serious tracking/keyframing/roto work...I guess you could use something like Trapcode Stroke for this.
 
there's no practical way to make something in AE that's going to look like a cord connected to the person. You could fake it with w 3D app, setting up soft body dynamics like a rope, but in AE, it's not going to look right.
 
Rapier_100a said:
there's no practical way to make something in AE that's going to look like a cord connected to the person. You could fake it with w 3D app, setting up soft body dynamics like a rope, but in AE, it's not going to look right.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is what I wanted to say, but I didn't want to discourage you too much. It's really tough to do something of this caliber...tracking in an iPod will be hard as well. I would think of a creative way to avoid throwing in the cord, maybe do a lot of organice lines flowing all over the background or something.
 
oneinfiniteloop said:
Yeah, this is what I wanted to say, but I didn't want to discourage you too much. It's really tough to do something of this caliber...tracking in an iPod will be hard as well. I would think of a creative way to avoid throwing in the cord, maybe do a lot of organice lines flowing all over the background or something.
Click to expand...


the only thing I can think of that would be even remortly believable would be to film a white rope/cord against a black background, and use it as a track mate. But matching it to the position of the actor as he dances would be a horrible pain.
 
Probably easiest (although ghetto) to have filmed it with the actor holding a chroma blue ipod & cord dancing against a green screen. Then pull a matte for the dancer from the greenscreen and a seperate matte for the ipod from the blue, then use that to trackmatte a white solid or the like to have your pristine (depending on your key/matte abilities/technique) white ipod & cord.

Issues you could run into however are motion blur on the cord.. which can be a BeeeOTCH against a greenscreen. You maye take part of rapier's suggestion and replace the ipod cord with a heavier/thicker rope material and give that a whirl.

The other option, as was mentioned above, is the 3D approach. In C4D you could pull this off pretty easily by using soft/rigid dynamics. Pin the 2 end points of a thin cylinder in space to where your ipod would be and let gravity do it's thing. Not easy or fast, but another option if all else fails.
 
I believe I read that this commercial used a 3D app with dynamics, I think it was Maya.. not sure.

The points at the ears and ipod were manually tracked. Between these points, a cord with a dynamics simulation was inserted in 3D.
 
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