How To Use Masks

Let’s just tow together a quick scene. I’m going to go up here to my contents folder under my library and I want to search for smoke. I have the smoke clip here that’s the one I’m looking for. I’m going to apply it. Now that it's applied, I'm going to go and get my square mask tool and make a mask like so. We just have this one little portion of our mask, open my timing pane and see my time line then you can see my smoke clip. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select and hit command D and duplicate that. Now that I have two, you can’t tell it because you land directly on top of the other.

When I say duplicate masks, you’ll notice when I duplicated the clip the mask come along with it. What I'm going to do now is I'm going go back to my content folder and find the bubbles. This is a pretty neat bubbles, we use this bubbles rapid. What I want to do is, since I‘ve already duplicated the smoke footage I'm going to take this bubbles rapid movie and drag it right on top of the smoke copy. It's going to replace it.

Now, what I want to do is I'm going to select my rectangle mask under my smoke and just drag it down. This ensures that the mask stays the exact same size. I'm going to put it in there. I want to duplicate my water clip just as I did my smoke clip. Select it, command D and we have our water copy.

I’m going to back to my contents folder and look for fire. Here we go with the full flame; lets take it and do the same thing. We’ll replace to fight the water copy with the fire clip, after that’s done select the rectangle mask and drag it down. As you can see, we have three sections of clips here, close that and rename it from water copy to fire.

Let's go back to the beginning of our clip. Let's add some text, just close up this group and call it background, I’ll just call it ‘BG’. Let's make another group and we’ll call this text. Now that we have our text groups, let's go to our text tool and write smoke. We’ll go to our sector list, properties and up the scale. Let's go back to our text group again, let's slip the text tool again and click in the middle of our water and type water.

You can't really see it because it’s a white text. I'm going to go to my style and change the color to a bluish-like. Go back to properties and change the scale to 18 because that’s what our smoke was. Let's go ahead and select that smoke, go to the text tab and change the color of it to gray.

Let's select our text group again, text tool and this time I’m going to write fire. Let's go to properties and then place the scale to 18 just like the others. Soon it will appear, stretch it out to make it about the same width and length as the other words. Let's go back to our text tab style and were going to change the color to red. Were going to make a dark red and darken it down a little, like so.

Now I have smoke, water and fire. Let's animate our text and use a few behaviors that I’ve talked about. So now as you see down to our time line we have out three texts or you could open up your project and work on your three texts by selecting them; or you can work whichever way you feel comfortable, it's up to you.

Let's start with our smoke behavior and I'm going to pull it up to the side like this right here. As I’ve said, there are a couple of behaviors you can use. Let's go to add behavior, basic motion, throw and click our HUD and bring it up. Let’s bring our throw over; this diagram controls the angle, direction and speed of your throw. As you see my throw, behavior goes from here all the way to the end. We don’t want to do that but we’re going to fix that with the stop behavior. I'm not going to worry about shortening it down and trying to get it to stop where I want. This is a much easier way.

Now that I have this throw behavior of the smoke, I want it to right there. We want it to stop. What I want to do is, as you can see I have my throw behavior selected. I'm going to go back to properties under position; I'm going to right click and scroll down to stop. You noticed a frozen stop behavior right where my play head is. What does it do? As you see our smoke text, it gets thrown in and as soon as it gets to stop, it stops right where it's at.

We want to animate our water but we don’t want the water to start animating until right there when the smokes stops. We’ll put the play head right where the smoke stops. We’ll select the water and drag it off over to the left, add behavior, basic motion, throw again and bring back up our HUD. This time we’ll throw it in the opposite direction.

Now, they’re coming in together but we don t them to come in together so I'm going to take my throw behavior in the water and drag it down to where the behavior of the smoke text stops. The throw behavior begins where the other texts stops. That way, smoke will come in then water will come in. when it gets right there, we want it to stop. Let's go to properties, right click position and stop.

Let's play it back; smoke, water and now let's do our fire. Select the fire text and we’ll go back to add behavior. Under basic motions, there’s a move behavior. If you wan t to select move, you can do that. That gives you the cross which let's you use the move your text around. So we can scroll forward, select the text first and make sure it's off and select you text make sure it's off screen. Now we have our move behavior, we want it to come in right when the other one stops so we’ll have it come in as you can see it's moving but we need to shorten the behavior. I’ll click it, hit the O key and that’ll lengthen it down, now you can see.

Now, we need to adjust with our controls, like so. You can also go to the position, strength and use the strength to adjust it. Now that we have this smooth behavior, as you can see right here it starts and it's going to come in and it's going to move over. It's going to stop right there so I want to drag the end of the behavior to right there and adjust it back and instead of doing that, I can just adjust my strength, like so.

That looks good. That’s how you use the move, stop and throw behavior. Let's play this from the beginning and you’ll see a smoke, water and fire. I think the fire comes in just a little too quick so we’ll adjust the move behavior. We’ll add a little and we’ll replay it. The smoke, water and the fire looks good. We’ll just close out timing pane, our timeline, hit shift Z to bring it to full screen. With command option O, you could make an out point and this is what we got by using the throw, stop behaviors and the move behaviors.