Layering and priorities

[WayneKremer]

Brian (or anyone for that matter ),

I'm trying to do an effect that sounds like it would be fairly easy to do in SS, but I'm confused on how to do it. In the song, Blue Christmas (lyric "Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree"), I plan on having red decoration images (starting from big spheres and then animating them to small ones) being placed on the tree. I then want a green morph starting at the top of the tree and filling in the entire tree MINUS the red decoration images. Right now, when the green morph comes down it colors all the red decorations to yellow.

So, is there any way of setting priorities (based on layers) like Photoshop does? How else would this be accomplished within SS? Thx!

Wayne

[BrianBruderer]

I would love to have the layer feature you mention, but unfortunately I do not. The layers are merely for organizing the effects, it has no impact on how the effects are played. There is a way to do what you say, but it is not what you would expect.

Because you can do overlapping effects, it is possible to have "channel collisions" where two different effects are each telling the channel what to do. The code has to make a decision on what to do in those cases. Currently, the rule it uses is to use the command that has the longest duration.

So, what you can do make your red decorations have 10% green and 10% blue in them. It will not have a noticable effect on the red and it makes it so any green or blue commands that come in will be ignored. This is because the red decoration image has a longer duration. So when the green morph comes down, the green commands to the area where the red decoration is will be ignored.

This is a totally undocumented feature that nobody would ever figure out on their own.

[WayneKremer]

Brian, that was the effect I was looking for! Very good information you have provided! Thanks for the inside information on this undocumented feature.

Edited September 16, 2012 by WayneKremer

[_Steve]

I can't wait to try this. Thanks!