flame-like auto-tangents?

[higginba]

Hello all,

We're using Silhouette Roto v2.0.0 standalone here at SOL. Is there any way to drag a point on a bezier and have the handles of the adjacent points on the curve maintain smooth tangency? In flame, you can do this by holding "G" while dragging a bezier mask point. I think Shake's masks also act this way by default.

I've got a bunch of penguins to roto, and they really love to shake their heads back and forth while looking at the camera. It would make rotoing their beaks a lot easier if I could drag points like that. Is this feature available and I missed in the docs? In a newer version of the app? Or not possible?

Thanks,
Brian

[paulm]

There isn't a direct way to move a point and have it "rotate" adjacent points. The closest thing is to Control+drag on the curve segment between two points - this will stick the curve to your mouse/pen, and the adjacent points will rotate to keep the curve smooth.

You can do something similar by using the per-point rotation feature.

In Reshape, select the points in the general area of movement. Switch to Transform tool, hover your mouse in the area of the axis of rotation, and press "." to drop the transform anchor. Now rotate the bounding box. This will rotate the entire group of points around that axis, and should let you do some nice regional movement like what you describe.

[higginba]

Thanks for the quick reply, Paul! Ctrl-dragging the curve seems to be the closest to what I'm looking for. I've already been using the selective rotation, which is one of the features that keeps me rotoing in Silhouette instead of the flame!

Imagine you've got a shot with a penguin turning its head from the left to the right. The beak is on the left at the beginning of the shot, then moves through the center of the frame through to the right side. Being able to (flame-style) G-drag the points for the beak on the left really quickly into a smooth line on the side of the penguin's head is quite nice! This is why I'm particularly interested in the auto-tanget move. I'll just brute force around it for now.

Thanks again for the quick reply!

-brian

[paulm]

Brian - sounds like you're making too much work for yourself. Just stick the beak in as its own shape, and animate it separately. No need to merge points at all!

It's almost always better to break a complex object into a bunch of shapes, and roto them separately.

[jbills]

sounds like someone needs to give b-splines a try. :)

in extremely general terms -
b-splines - best for things alive. organic. smooth.
beziers get the call for dead things and all of their hard angles.

silhouette's b-splines misbehave a little when you add points, so try to get all of your points out there at first and animate from that most complex frame, instead of trying to add them later.

you know what else is really nice - corner pinning. 4 points are better than... well however many you have on your shape, which most likely is more than 4. :)

PS - you guys should update to v2.3

[higginba]

No need to worry, gentlemen! After I finish rotoing this particular penguin, there are 50 or 60 others that need cutting out. I'll give B-splines a whirl. Those translate to flame .GMasks ok, correct?

[marcop]

When you export B-splines to Gmask format, they are converted to Beziers.