Subtitles of the Movie

For the most part, you might think that a Paint Operator is just good for creating Vector Shapes. But it can also be used to create a mask. What we're going to do now is we're going to open up a space scene in the Galaxy Folder and we're going to make the planet Mars look like it's pretty much like a ghost planet by having it blurred out a little bit and barely visible. And we're going to use a Paint Operator Mask to do just that. So let's go to File, New and we're going to create a new composite and I'm going to just leave it at the defaults here. I have it on 3D mode, but you don't have to have it on 3D of course for this particular lesson. I'm going to bring in some footage now and you'll find it in the Galaxy Folder. I want to bring in the star field and I'm going to Control Click and I'm going to bring in Mars. I'll click OK and on Mars I'm going to scale it up quite a bit. So on the Composite Controls I'm going to scale it up and let's put it into the center like so. I'm also going to scale up the star field too just so it looks a little bit better there. What we want to do is we're going to blur out the edges here and have the whole planet just barely visible as if though it were a new discovery. So the scientists are like there's something there. We're not sure whether it's a planet. Alright. So on the Mars layer in the workspace, let's right click and add a new Paint Operator. The Paint Tools open up and what we want to do is we want to paint on Mars. So I'm going to zoom up a little bit here and I'm going to create a Filled Tool here. I'm going to use the Filled Ellipse Tool and I'm going to draw an ellipse like so. And I'll move it down a little bit as well. Now what we're going to do at this point is take a look at the Paint Controls. We're currently working with a filled shape as we have here instead of stroked. We want to change this guy right here from a shape to a mask. And I'll go back to shape and let's see what happens here. When I mask it, the stuff inside the mask remains and the stuff on the outside goes away. So check this out. To bring that stuff back, we're going to add a feather. So let's go to Feather and slowly but surely bring some of that mask back in and give us that nice ghost, creepy, like there's something there feel. You can use this same technique for anything that you want to have barely visible. Really, really good for ethereal objects, ghosts, woods, you know, anything that's going to be creepy. Underwater things and that kind of thing. So I'll go ahead and deselect it and you can see the effect we're going for here. You also want to make sure that when you're working with this, that you can also work with the opacity if you need to on your mask, but of course you have to select it and you can drop that down. But we don't really want to do that. And we also want to make sure that our mode here is set to Replace instead of Add or Subtract or Intersect. So Replace is going to be really good for us. Now, I'm going to double click on the composite again and I'll zoom out and now you have this really nice ghosted out planet based on a paint object. So we have our filled ellipse and we can always hide it or show it by clicking on it in our workspace. And you can see the difference here. So once again, you can use a vector shape as a mask in Combustion and then feather that to give it a nice, soft edge.