Making my bird black instead of white

Hi,

I’m currently in the process of layering a flying bird video over top of a back ground. I have isloated the bird from the blue sky by playing with the colour levels and then applying a threshold. I now have a white bird flying all on it’s own without a background. I would like to overlay this bird onto my image now but in the colour black, so that it’s off in the distance flying around. When I invert my colours, the bird simply disapears from showing up on the screen. It seems it has to be any shade but black, as black just makes things more transparent.

Can someone please advise me as to how I can layer my black bird and be able tosee it in my compositon?

Thanks for any help.

Marc.

Hi Marc,

What composite operator are you using to overlay the bird over the background? An Over TOP with the bird in the first input should get you what you want. This is of course if the alpha channel of the bird is set correctly. Have a look here to see how you can look at a TOPs colour channels separately: derivative.ca/wiki/index.php … TOP_Viewer

cheers
Markus

Thanks Markus, That did the trick. I now have my birds in the foreground. I have been trying to do x,y,z transforms on this image in order to cause the birds starting from the distance and coming closer and closer until they fly overhead and off the screen. Previously I had done these types of manipulations by creating a geo rectangle and then moving it around accordingly. Is there a simple way to do this? I am already projecting my movie image onto the screen, it’s just a matter of moving it around. What’s a simple way to do this?

Thanks for your patience with us beginners!

Marc.

Hey Marc,

all the composite operators have a transform section in their parameters so maybe you can actually move the bird around quite nicely by just animating the rotate, translate and scale parameters?

For a more sophisticated system including 3D transforms you would want to create a 3D scene … There is a nice short introduction to that here: [url]First Things to Know about TouchDesigner - Derivative

Cheers
Markus

Hello Markus,

If it’s OK I’ll start with less sofisticated. Now, I am trying to apply variable user manipulated transforms to the various parameters such as scale, rotate, grow/shrink, etc. And I cannot successfully link any variable data to these value inputs. I don’t know what I’m missing here? I can manually enter data and get fixed transforms of my movie object, but that’s all I can do right now. I have tried applying MIDI CHOPS, speed CHOPS, etc, by dragging them onto the CHOP variables…also entering corrsponding channel data …tx, ty… etc. I have included a link for my project and image files. Could you please attach one simple transform variable to my image just so I can see how it is done?

Thanks.

If you unzip these files onto your desktop with the default folder names, then everything should open up for you as it is on my system.

sendspace.com/file/hg4qm7

Hello Marc,

to use CHOP channels to animate parameters follow the steps outlined here: derivative.ca/wiki/index.php … Parameters

Essentially you need to drag not the node onto the parameter but a channel from a CHOP. You can do this by turning the viewer flag, of the CHOP you want to export from, on (derivative.ca/wiki/index.php … wer_Active) and then drag the channel onto the parameter.

Cheers
Markus
Touch Files.zip (3.73 MB)