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Adobe After Effects 6.5 Tracking an Effect (like a distortion/liquify effect)

I know how to establish tracking for a movie/layer in After Effects 6.5. But, once you've established your tracking path, how can you assign an EFFECT to that path so that (for instance) if you were to add a distortion to somebody's face, like to enlarge their eyes for instance using liquify, that the actual distortion effect could follow the path the tracking had defined? I know you can easily track other layers, but can you track effects? Please help.

Sohel Rana

Hi:

Do you mean something like this?

http://creativecow.net/articles/zwar_chris/morph/

rsdn

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

yukele

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turn123

Hi jj4375 :-),
Since we haven't heard from you for a couple of days could you please give us an update on the status of this question?
See: https://www.experts-exchange.com/help.jsp#hi51 Thank you, turn123's friendly update request script.
Offtopic comments about this script to https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/21188389/Unanswered-question-list-and-ping-feedback-and-bugs.html please :-).

jj4375

ASKER

I will be testing each of these options out today and I will award points based on my success with either one of them. Many thanks; I may split the points if they both work well.

jj4375

ASKER

Liquify does not seem to work with tracking. That is the effect I am specifically interested in. Bulge, magnify, and others do work. Can anyone show me how to track liquify? If not I will award points, as is.

yukele

Just did a quick test, and following these instructions I was able to track liquify. One thing I noticed is that the the effect point control for liquify defaults to the top left corner of the compostion, but after selecting it choosing to animate, the tracker feature region gets put in the middle of the composition. After moving the + from there to where the effect point control is it worked fine.

If you explain what happens when you try the tracking I may be able to help a bit more...

jj4375

ASKER

You are right about the point control. Therefore, I will aware points to your first "big" suggestion unless you can answer this: Even when I move the point control, it still acts weird. For instance, if I use the "contract" feature in liquify without moving the point control, then it distorts evenly. But, once I move the point control then it doesn't distort evenly... seems to "constrain" the amount of contraction/location of contraction. Any ideas?

yukele

To see what happens when you move the point control, in the liquify settings in the effects controls window, twirl down "view options" and check "view mesh"

If the effect looks good when the point control is in its default position then leaving it there and tracking should give good results.