Beginner question: Using a mask on multiple layers

[peterm68002905]

I want to do something (that I think is) very simple, and it is driving me sligthly insane 🙂

I am trying to make a whiteboard animation: A hand with a pencil traces a drawing of a guy.

I have the guy and on that same layer I've made the path for the Stroke effect, that reveals the drawing gradually. This works fine.

On another layer I have the drawing of the hand, that's supposed to trace the drawing, as it is revealed.

I have tried selecting the Mask Path and copying it into the Position property of the layer with the hand on it. I get this result:

The path changes scale and position and I can no longer transform it. If I could, I could just move it back and fit it to the guy.

I have tried copying the Mask Path to the layer with the hand, which also resizes the path, but let's me transform it. However, whenever I copy the path to the Position property it becomes this total mess. I have searched extensively on Google and this forum, but with no luck.

I feel like my problem is, that I don't totally understand the difference between Mask Paths and Motion Paths, and how paths are connected to layers. I don't necessarily want to understand this, I just want to know how I can use this one path, in both the Stroke effect on the one layer, and also to create keyframes for the Position property on another layer.

Alternatively, if somebody knows of an easier way to do whiteboard animation, I am also interested 🙂

I hope this question makes sense. First post; happy to be here 🙂

[Jose Panadero · Accepted solution]

The main problem is that you drew the path on a scaled layer so this is not the "real size" of your masks. Masks are processed before transformations, this is why when you copy the mask paths to paste them as motion path it does not match. There are a lot of ways to to it correctly but maybe the simple way to solve that is to precompose the hand layer with the motion path, move the attributes into the new composition, scale and move this precomp to the size of your guy to place the pencil exactly over your illustration.

[peterm68002905]

Thank you so much 🙂 I was aware that the mask was dependent on the scale of the layer somehow; I just didn't know how to work around it. When I pre-compose my layers before I make the path, it works 🙂 I'm sure there is a neater and more flexible way to do it that I will hopefully discover down the line, but for now this really works. Thanks again!