#autotrace

[newfangledstudios]

Using After Effects’ Autotrace to Create a Hand Drawn Animated Look from Footage

A #motiontestmonday by Fred Kennedy

The auto trace feature in After Effects can be used to trace either a single frame or a sequence of frames.

In this motion test, I’ve used auto trace to process a number of stock footage elements we had lying around here at Newfangled. The awesome thing about auto trace is the fact that it creates animated masks based on the footage. These masks play very well with a number of effects inside AE. In these examples I have mainly used combinations of the scribble effect and Trapcode’s 3d Stroke to stylize the traced masks. Although it’s not a fully procedural effect, it’s a super quick way to create hand drawn looking animations with organic movement and lots of detail. Just make sure you plan those shots well to avoid doing work over and over again.

To finish the style, I applied the “posterize time” effect to all of my layers with varying frame rate reductions (to vary the layers for a bit more complexity). For more information on working with Fred or how we can help you with your next project, contact our Executive Producer Jenna Vandermost.

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[homebrewupdates-blog]

autotrace version 0.31.1 for OS X

The formula for autotrace was recently updated to version 0.31.1.

To install autotrace on your Mac, open your Terminal application and run the following commands;

brew update brew install autotrace

 The updated formula is as follows:

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require 'formula' def without_imagemagick? ARGV.include? '--without-imagemagick' end class Autotrace < Formula url 'http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/autotrace/AutoTrace/0.31.1/autotrace-0.31.1.tar.gz' homepage 'http://autotrace.sourceforge.net' md5 '54eabbb38d2076ded6d271e1ee4d0783' depends_on 'imagemagick' unless without_imagemagick? def options [['--without-imagemagick', 'Compile without ImageMagick (non-bloaty)']] end def install args = [ "--disable-debug", "--disable-dependency-tracking", "--prefix=#{prefix}", "--mandir=#{man}" ] args << "--without-magick" if without_imagemagick? system "./configure", *args system "make install" end end

This package, autotrace, depends on;

imagemagick

See which packages depend on autotrace.