Building a Progressive Movie Processing Melt Effect

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Building a Progressive Movie Processing…

Someone recently asked about how to generate a progressive wet melt effect applied to a movie file. So that as the processed movie plays, the wet melt effect applied to the movie gets progressively more extreme over time. This is actually pretty easy to achieve in Studio Artist, by key-framing your wet melt effect over time in the Paint Action Sequence Timeline.

For this post, I decided to use the Default : Water category paint preset called WaterDripDown1. This preset simulates the effect of dropping water onto a vertical canvas, so the water drops drip downwards as they diffusely wet smear the canvas.

The 2nd and 3rd gallery images above show the PASeq I used to create my progressive wet melt effect. The PAseq is very simple, only 2 steps.

I first erase the canvas to the source image. I then AutoPaint with the WaterDripDown1 paint preset. Note that I have an initial keyframe for my AutoPaint action step at keyframe time 1, and a second keyframe recorded at keyframe time 60 (the end frame for my short 60 frame test movie file). If your source movie file is longer, you can just place your end keyframe at the appropriate end frame time for your movie file.

I made 2 manual editing changes to the WaterDripDown1 factory paint preset. Both changes were in the Path Start control panel.

First, I turned On the Reset Generator parameter. Doing so insures that the same pseudo-random sequence of path start positions generated by the Smooth Random 1 Generator is used for each frame in the movie. I did this to reduce flicker in the final processed movie, and because the melt effect is supposed to appear to progressively grow over time as the processed movie plays.

Remember, the goal was to add a progressive melt to the movie over time. So we want to always progressively generate the melt the same way for each frame in the movie file (using the same sequence of wet paint strokes and then adding additional ones as the frame count progresses).

Then, I changed the max Stroke parameter for each of the 2 keyframes associated with my AutoPaint action step. I started with Max Stroke set to 0 for the first keyframe when I initially recorded the AutoPaint action step in the PASeq (4th gallery image above).

I then changed the Max Stroke to 3000 (5th gallery image above). I then adjusted the PASeq Timeline to display my end keyframe at frame time 60. I then option clicked the keyframe call at frame time 60 associated with my AutoPaint action step to record a new keyframe cell at frame time 60 for that action step.

So, the WaterDripDown1 paint preset starts out painting 0 wet water paint strokes for frame 1 of the movie processing. Over time, the number of wet paint strokes progressively increases. At the final frame of our short source movie used for this example (frame 60), 3000 wet water paint strokes are painted. By turning on the Reset Generator parameter, we insured that the same physical positioning sequence of paint strokes was used for our progressively increasing melt effect as it evolves over time.

The final processed progressive wet melt movie file output can be seen here.

Categories: Painting and Paint Synthesizer, Video - Auto Rotoscoping - Animation

Building a Progressive Movie Processing Melt Effect

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