Wave Warp to animate cartoon smoke, one edge has stroke facing the wrong way

Question

Hi all!

I am using Wave Warp to animate cartoon smoke for a background in After Effects.

It's looking good so far, except there's one problem I can't figure out. The stroke of the shape has semicircles on the right side facing the wrong way. See the screenshots below.

Pinning it on different edges doesn't help (you would think the center pinning would do it). Animating individual lines means I won't be able to have the grey gradient inbetween. I tried to find if there's anyway to designate the stroke as "outside" the shape, but I couldn't find it. The mirror effect doesn't help, although I may be using it wrong.

Is there anyway I can get the semicircles on the right edge to face the way I want it to? Or will I have to find a work around/ another solution to this problem?

Best,

Nicole

Rick Gerard · Answer

You will have to draw a mask through your smoke layer splitting it in the middle, duplicate the mask, set the second copy to subtract. Then you will add 2 copies of Wave Warp with identical settings but the Direction of the second copy needs to be 180º more than the first copy. Then reveal the compositing options and set Mask 1 for one of the copies of Wave World and Mask 2 for the other. Here's what that looks like on a shape layer rectangle. I've shown all modified properties on the layer.

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