Mask unstability : Have an issue with mask mode changing its effects on animation layer randomly

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
October 24, 2021
2 replies
539 views

Hello,

I'm using After Effects CC (ver 18.4.1), and I am having troubles with my masks acting a little bit oddly.
I made two mask layers to make my animated character "pass behind" some elements of the background, and I've been doing it successfully with the "substract" mode of my mask layers. Unfortunately, without touching anything, it started to change its behaviour after some while and make my character disappear for all the lenght of the sequence and everywhere in the frame. In this bug, it would first disappear partially in unwanted places but now it's totally. The character become visible again when I change the mode of the mask layers to "none" which is not of great use.

Does someone has an idea of what is going on? I've tried touching all the modes and checked the behaviour of each elements with each other but didn't find anything weird.
I've also initially put some key animations to my mask layers to activate/deactivate it, but it didn't have any problem and then it did.
Should I delete those masks and make some new ones?

Thank you

This topic has been closed for replies.

OussK

Community Expert

when you facing unstable behavior on AE first thing try to purge the memory and the disk cache, you can do that from edit/purge/all memories and disk cache

裕

裕大5FD8Author

Participating Frequently

Thank you, I will try it 🙂

A

Ali Jaber

Community Expert

Can you post a screenshot showing your workspace including timeline and comp view?

裕

裕大5FD8Author

Participating Frequently

Sorry for the late answer!
Here it is. Is that what you needed?

(Note: I have two animated sequences (one is the character and the other is animated light effects) inside which I applied two mask layers in the same configuration for both sequences)

While making the screenshots, I realized that if one of the mask (red) was on mode "substract" with opacity: 0%, it would make the character disappear. Yet the other one (blue) doesn't seem to have that issue.

When I make keys to make the masks "disappear" (by reducing its opacity levels to 0%) so it doesn't block future moments in the animation, the (blue) mask work very well, but the other one makes the animation disappear instead.

I put description in each image title to make it more clear. On the last one I didn4t bother to create keys for the (red) mask, it was just to show how it behaves with 0% opacity. I tried with keys before, it didn't work so I deleted it because I thought it was part of the problem.

Should I move the masks out of the frame instead of using opacity levels?

A

Ali Jaber

Community Expert

I wonder why you enabled 3D on the front layer, it looks like you have both layer's position at 0 in z.
Because both layers are 3D, their z position controls which one is in front

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