Tracer question.

[PIL]

Hello. I think that the tracer is a great tool to pull keys with hair, details, etc, but is very slow to animate the mask when you have the tracer finish and the talent moves quicky or change his position. Any trick or the only option is animate or track the mask shape to follow the talent? I don,t understand what,s the use of the option “sample on” when the talent moves outside my mask.

[Anonymous]

When doing Gmasks ( I assume thats what you mean)..
the individual points of the Gmask can be tracked- but more useful normally is to use the tracker on the axis of a Gmask.

A few other pieces of general advice in the area of roto:

1. when rotoing, study the movement for natural pauses or starts – they are your best points for key frames, (you’ll need others), but in say a walking shot, the natural pacing is much better for keyframes than say just every 10 frames.

2. If you have arms or legs swinging in and out of say a body, animate a separate Gmask for each bit, it may seem like more work but it is actually much easier to do the body first then each arm separately ( for example)

3. animate the curves before you add softness, it will be faster even on FRONT view

4. aim to have a much of points fall on points of the picture that you can mentally keep track of. I have seen artists get a great shape on frame 1 and another on frame 10 -but as the points are all on different parts of the image on frame 1 and 10 – the interpolated middle is wrong, so if a point is on the ear on frame 1, try and keep it also on the eye in frame 10 – or in the same area, the interpolation is much more likely to be accurate.

5. You can add or delete points during a roto session, they will not be actually deleted ( just turned off after that keyframe) – clicking delete on them a second time will fully delete them. This is key when you rotoing something changing in scale and thus detail.

6. don’t forget you can push and pop the render layer order of different roto shapes, there is no layers menu – just the pop and push buttons.

7. The tracer option is great for motion blurred rotos as even without using its special key functions – you can have variable softness around a shape.

I am sure there are more but those a few that jump to mind

mike seymour
FXG 🙂

[Author]

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