Vector Animation
Vector Paint & Spline Objects
Boris RED's Vector Paint add features not available in any other compositing application. It has not been grafted onto an otherwise pixel-based feature set, but is at the heart of the vector-based effects tools in Boris RED.
Stroke and Fill
Any path created using RED's vector tools, or any path imported from Adobe® Illustrator™, can be stroked or filled in a variety of ways. Multiple strokes can be applied along the center, inside or outside of the path, with such adjustable, animatable preset styles as bevel and glow. Each stroked path can also have multiple shadows (drop, cast, and solid), any parameter of which be animated.
The newly enhanced Style Palette in RED 2.5 allows paint objects to be saved with customized fill and strokes, and applied to any subsequently created vector paths.
Brushes
RED 2.5 also has tools such as a pencil and brush for the direct creation of stroked paths. Any parameters of these tools can be animated: Color, Opacity, Size, Flatness, Hardness, Spacing, and Angle. (Some other vector paint products are unable to animate ANY of these.)
And because this is vector paint, bezier points can be added, transformed, and animated over time — again, features missing from some other vector paint tools, which do not allow the animation of vector paint's control points. To facilitate this animation, RED 2.5 adds an onion-skinning option, so that users can follow the changes they make across multiple frames.
Favorite brushes may be saved to the Style Palette and re-used, with all parameters intact, including whether the saved brush will be creating stroke, fill, or both.
Spline Primitives
A number of customizable spline primitives are supplied with RED 2.5. These include circles, squares, stars, hearts and arrows. These vector shapes can manipulated as objects or at the level of bezier control points, with easy controls for animating elements such as the number of points on a star, or the roundness of corners on a rectangle. Spline Primitives may be used as text backdrops or other design elements in a scene, extruded, and animated to create vector-based transitions. They may also be used as the basis for vector masks in rotoscoping.
Below, spline primitive hearts with natural media and particles.
Boris RED's Vector Paint add features not available in any other compositing application. It has not been grafted onto an otherwise pixel-based feature set, but is at the heart of the vector-based effects tools in Boris RED.
Stroke and Fill
Any path created using RED's vector tools, or any path imported from Adobe® Illustrator™, can be stroked or filled in a variety of ways. Multiple strokes can be applied along the center, inside or outside of the path, with such adjustable, animatable preset styles as bevel and glow. Each stroked path can also have multiple shadows (drop, cast, and solid), any parameter of which be animated.
| Although some other products with vector paint features do not allow paths to be filled, RED 2.5 does. The color and opacity of the fill can be animated, and, because paint exists on its own layer, can also be positioned in 3D space, filtered, and animated like any other layer in RED 2.5. Animation options for paint go well beyond setting the start and end points for individual strokes. RED 2.5's unique Write On feature automatically animates the start and end point of multiple strokes to create the illusion of hand-drawn paint with unparalleled ease. |
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The newly enhanced Style Palette in RED 2.5 allows paint objects to be saved with customized fill and strokes, and applied to any subsequently created vector paths.
Brushes
RED 2.5 also has tools such as a pencil and brush for the direct creation of stroked paths. Any parameters of these tools can be animated: Color, Opacity, Size, Flatness, Hardness, Spacing, and Angle. (Some other vector paint products are unable to animate ANY of these.)
And because this is vector paint, bezier points can be added, transformed, and animated over time — again, features missing from some other vector paint tools, which do not allow the animation of vector paint's control points. To facilitate this animation, RED 2.5 adds an onion-skinning option, so that users can follow the changes they make across multiple frames.
Favorite brushes may be saved to the Style Palette and re-used, with all parameters intact, including whether the saved brush will be creating stroke, fill, or both.
Spline Primitives
A number of customizable spline primitives are supplied with RED 2.5. These include circles, squares, stars, hearts and arrows. These vector shapes can manipulated as objects or at the level of bezier control points, with easy controls for animating elements such as the number of points on a star, or the roundness of corners on a rectangle. Spline Primitives may be used as text backdrops or other design elements in a scene, extruded, and animated to create vector-based transitions. They may also be used as the basis for vector masks in rotoscoping.
Below, spline primitive hearts with natural media and particles.
Rotoscoping & Custom Masking
Unlimited masks per layer. It has a nice ring, doesn't it? Other compositing applications limit the number of masks to 127 per layer, which sounds like a lot, until it's compared to the number of masks per layer allowed in Boris RED 2.5: unlimited.
Unlimited masks per layer. It has a nice ring, doesn't it? Other compositing applications limit the number of masks to 127 per layer, which sounds like a lot, until it's compared to the number of masks per layer allowed in Boris RED 2.5: unlimited.
By combining the precision of vector tools for creating spline objects, and an exceptional range of options for animating them, RED 2.5 offers superior tools for rotoscoping: creating and animating precise, custom vector masks. Masks can be inverted with one click, and be animated with motion blur.
Any parameter related to strokes and fill used to comprise the mask are in fact animatable: softness, opacity, composite modes and jitter are just a few of these. Onion-skin views are available to observe changes simultaneously across multiple frames.
Custom, animated vector masks are just the beginning of RED 2.5's masking power. Every track contains its own nested mask track, allowing any compositional element to be used as a mask, and just as easily inverted. With the unique Boris PixelChooser™ technology, dynamic pixel-based masks can be created using the pixel information from any channel (individual color channels, alpha, luma, HSL Difference, etc.). PixelChooser allows any layer, including a nested multi-layer composition, to provide the channel information for masks, so that channel information from one layer or set of layers can serve as the basis of the mask for another.
A classic compositing workflow has been to create text in an application like Adobe® Illustrator™, convert it to outlines, bring the outlines into a compositing application to put them in motion, then send the rendered output back into the editing application. Once converted to outlines, the text is no longer editable as text. Any changes thus require going all the way back to the beginning of the process: create text and convert to outlines in one application, animate in another, then back to the editor.
Instead, RED 2.5 creates vector text that remains fully editable as text throughout the compositing process, within your favorite editing application. Fewer steps, more flexibility, and all the power you want, exactly where you need it.
Animation
Text animation has always been both easy and powerful in RED. Title containers have provided one-click auto-animation of rolls, crawls, zooms and fades of multiple pages of text, and RED 2.5 adds the additional option of shuffling pages.
A new auto-animation feature in RED 2.5 is Type On text, although the typing on of letters one at a time is only the beginning. Type On allows the progressive application of multiple text animation parameters in user-defined combinations: set letters to spin, tumble or rotate, to fade or skew, scale, fade and more.
Text on a Path
Along with the creation of vector text within RED 2.5 come a variety of ways to exploit the power of vectors, including text on a vector path. Simply create the path in RED 2.5, which also supports the import of paths from Adobe Illustrator. Unlike many other applications that offer this feature, RED 2.5 allows the shape of the path itself to animate over time, as well as its position, and its orientation in 3D space.
Outline animation
In fact, RED 2.5 also offers the ability to create text and convert it to outlines as well. RED 2.5 creates vector text natively, so this step is not necessary for smooth rasterizing. Because RED 2.5 can animate vectors, however, converting text to outlines offers the option of editing and animating any aspect of the vector path. Control points for text may be animated for morphing-style effects, text fill and multiple strokes may be manipulated over time, and jitter animations applied.
Stoke and Fill
RED 2.5 offers more options for the creation and animation of the stroke and fill of text than any other desktop application. Each character can have up multiple strokes, each of which can be set separately from the fill of the text. Because stroke and fill are in fact separate elements of text, they can be individually filtered and animated, creating dramatic effects very easily.
Because RED 2.5's strokes and fill are true vector objects, they may be included as part of exported Flash animations. This is in marked contrast to other applications whose stroke and fill are bitmapped features, and cannot be passed through during Flash export.
Title Compositing in 3 Dimensions
Boris RED has always offered compositing in three dimensions. For titling, that means that 2D titles can be manipulated in 3D space, mapped to 3D shapes, viewed through animated 3D cameras, and more, including one button extrusion to 3D objects.
| No integrated desktop compositing application has more than a small fraction of RED 2.5's capabilities for the creation and animation of vectors. As a result, no compositor can do nearly as much with imported vector files as RED 2.5. Importing EPS files with layers preserved, and animating with smooth rasterization is where RED 2.5 begins. Imported files retain their original vector information, which can be further modified directly in RED: multiple strokes and fill can be added, deleted, or changed in any way (color, opacity, size, etc.), and the changes animated over time, with such additional parameters as bevel, glow, and jitter. Or, you can apply saved styles for fill and multiple strokes may also be applied from the Style Palette. You can even save the combination of stroke and fill on the original imported object to the Style Palette for later reuse. Individual bezier points may be added, deleted, and animated in any way desired. |
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And because RED offers a truly three dimensional compositing environment, imported vector files may be extruded and animated as 3D objects. Even after extrusion, imported EPS files retain their layer information, and may still be separated for animation as individual objects. Just as easily, only selected layers may be extruded. Individual bezier points may still be animated even after extrusion.
Only RED 2.5 offers this range of vector animation options.