Table of Contents | Learning by Doing

Using the Move and Zoom effects | Using interactivity, animation, and audio | Using video in your multimedia | Compressing Video and Audio


Masking Interactive Ripples

  1. Create a new movie by choosing New from the File menu. Set the new movie dimensions to 400x300 and include a sprite track so the ripples can be interactive. The movie width is a multiple of 16, to ensure that the sprite track will display correctly on Windows machines.

  2. Select the Layout view by clicking the Layout tab at the top left of the Movie window.

  3. In the Finder, make a copy of the ripple photo, and open the copy in a painting or photo editing program such as Photoshop or GraphicConverter.

  4. Crop the image to the area you want to have ripple, if necessary. In this case, the ripple will cover the entire image, so no cropping is necessary.

  5. Lasso the portions of the image that are not under water (or which should not ripple for some other reason) and delete them (leaving them white).

  6. Adjust the brightness and contrast so that everything else turns black, and save the file (you can also do this by painting over the image if your painting application doesn't include brightness and contrast controls).

  7. Save the mask file and quit your painting program.

  8. In the Finder, click the ripple photo and drag it into the Electrifier Pro Movie window.

  9. In Electrifier Pro, select the ripple photo actor by clicking it, and drag it to a new position at the top of the movie.
    Tip: If you prefer to move the actor to a specific and exact location, you can enter the numerical coordinates in the Inspector palette. The Horizontal Position used in the example is 201, and the Vertical Position is 126.


  10. Click the Ripple tool in the Tool palette. With the Ripple tool selected, click at the top left corner of the ripple photo, and drag to the bottom right corner to create a ripple covering the whole image. (If you were only rippling part of the image, you would draw the ripple over that portion you created a mask for in steps 1-4.) In the Ripple Options dialog box, click the Mask box to choose a mask image. Select the mask file you created in step 7 and click Open to keep the cobblestones dry. Click OK to create the ripple.

  11. Adjust the position of the ripple so that the edges of the mask line up exactly with the equivalent areas on the image.

For more information

For detailed information about the tools used to create No-Bandwidth media, see the Tool palette section of the Window & Palette Reference.

Credits

The images in the ripple masking tutorial are copyright © Christoph Rosenberger/Visual Production. Used by permission.

Using the Move and Zoom effects | Using interactivity, animation, and audio | Using video in your multimedia | Compressing Video and Audio

Copyright © 1998 Electrifier, Inc. All rights reserved.