Chapter 12: drawing and painting, Using paint tools, Work with paint tools and paint strokes – Adobe After Effects CS3 User Manual
Page 307
302
Chapter 12: Drawing and painting
Using paint tools
Scott Squires provides a pair of movies that show how to rotoscope, both painting and masking:
•
•
Work with paint tools and paint strokes
The Brush tool
, Clone Stamp tool
, and Eraser tool
are all paint tools. You use each in the Layer panel to
apply paint strokes to a layer. Each paint stroke’s brush marks add or remove pixels from the layer or modify the
layer’s transparency without modifying the layer source.
Each paint stroke has its own duration bar, Stroke Options properties, and Transform properties, which you can see
and modify in the Timeline panel. Each paint stroke is, by default, named for the tool that created it, with a number
that indicates the order in which it was drawn.
At any time after you draw a paint stroke, you can modify and animate each of its properties using the same
techniques that you use to modify a layer’s properties and duration. You can copy paint stroke path properties to and
from properties for mask paths, shape layer paths, and motion paths. For even more power and flexibility, you can
link these properties using expressions. (See “Creating shapes and masks” on page 318 and “Add, edit, and remove
expressions” on page 549.)
Important: To specify settings for a paint stroke before you apply it, use the Paint and Brush Tips panels. To change and
animate properties for a paint stroke after you’ve applied it, use the stroke’s properties in the Timeline panel.
Individual brush marks are distributed along each paint stroke—though the marks may appear to merge together to
form a continuous stroke with the default settings. Brush settings for each brush in the Brush Tips panel determine
the shape, spacing, and other properties of brush marks; you can also modify these Stroke Options properties for
each stroke in the Timeline panel.
Groups of paint strokes appear in the Timeline panel as instances of the Paint effect. Each instance of the Paint effect
has a Paint On Transparent option. If you select this option, the layer source image and all effects that precede this
instance of the Paint effect in the effect stacking order are ignored; the paint strokes are applied on a transparent
layer.
To see a video tutorial on using the drawing and painting tools, go to the Adobe website at
.
•
To show selected layers’ paint strokes in the Timeline panel, press PP.
•
To select paint strokes in the Layer panel, use the Selection tool to click a paint stroke or drag a box around
portions of multiple paint strokes.
To momentarily activate the Selection tool, press and hold V.
•
To show only selected paint strokes in the Timeline panel, select paint strokes and press SS.