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Now back to the tutorial for both versions.
From the Tool Palette, select the Rectangle Mask Tool and draw a mask around the word. Try to keep the mask as close to the word as possible.[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Select the Pen Tool, and on the same layer create a mask that is the shape of a shark. It doesn’t have to be perfect (unless you are doing this for scientific purposes – grin). You should have something that looks like the following.
Now to the Shark layer apply the Reshape effect from Effect>Distort>Reshape. Reshape takes the shape of one mask and distorts or “reshapes” that mask to match the second mask.
For the Source Mask select Mask 1 (our rectangle mask), for Destination Mask select Mask 2 (our shark shape).
Nothing appears to happen at first because you need to adjust the Percent amount. Go ahead and crank the value to 100%.
You should have a pretty good shape, but sometimes you will get some odd results. For example, the text may rotate around and not line up properly. Don’t fear there is a way to adjust this.
With the Reshape effect selected in the Effect Controls Window, you will see two white squares on your masks in the Comp Window. These points represent the Correspondance Points that help with alignment.
In the Comp Window click and drag these points around until the words resolve and fit the shape more accurately.
You may wish to adjust the Elasticity for the Reshape effect to see what types of results you will get. In my example, I use Loose.
Finally, to add a little flair to our Shark, you can apply the Ramp effect and change the Start Color to a light blue and the End Color to white, and then adjust the Start and End of Ramp control points to create your own Blue Fin Shark.
There you have it. With this knowledge you can create a whole ocean of fish shaped text elements.
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| Everybody out of the water! |
In a future exercise, we’ll create an Octopus using the new Text Tool in After Effects 6.0 and then we’ll animate our Sharks/Fish and Octopus.
When not working deep in the labs of the DMN Central Division testing the latest and greatest software/hardware products Stephen Schleicher can be found at the local university teaching a few courses on video and web production. He can be reached at schleicher@mindspring.com. You can also visit him on the web at www.mindspring.com/~schleicher
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