Generate stroke not working with multiple masks

[rasmus229760943dus]

Hi community! 🙂

Background: I want to create a vine growth animation, where it grows from the ground and up. I have used AI to illustrate everything, Layered my Vine, and imported to AE. I have used Generate < Stroke effect to have 30 different masks/effects applied, and keyframed each to match how i want it to grow. It looks correct with Paint Style "On Original Image" applied, but when i switch all layers to "Reveal original image" it displays nothing. When i do it one at a time, each effect nullifies the former.

I have done a quick fix, where i copy the effects/masks to a shape layer, and put it on top of the original illustration and track matted it, but i thought i originally did it the right way, but apparently not by using multiple masks/effects.

What sort of workflow should i use? Or is there a fix that i am just not understanding?

AE V 24.1.0

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

It works correctly as designed. Only the first instance must be set to "On Transparent" and all additional effects to "On Original". AE is buffer-based, so instructing it over and over to erase the previous buffer would of course nix all results. It's literally like working with layered foil/ slides. Outside that your failure is simply the old beginner mistake (no offense) of trying to do too much at once and in a single comp. Pre-composing the strokes and using the result as a matte is indeed much more efficient and then it just won't matter how many layers you actually have inside your pre-comp. It will always be just a single clean matte layer in the main comp.

Mylenium

[rasmus229760943dus]

Thank you very much for the reply Mylenium 🙂

Good to know I wasn't too far off with what the correct workflow was. I will make sure to keep that in mind in the future to use more layers for my desired effect 🙂

When I have time, I will go back to the project and try the "On Transparent" on the first instance, to see if that works on a single layer.

And thanks again. I take no offense, and always happy to learn 🙂