Text Wrap action - select working path from current document

[jamess24091030]

Hey all! 

Working on an animation where magazine style text wraps around a moving greenscreen character. I thought this would be possible to do via actions because I can export an image sequence from after effects with the black and white outline of the character and create an action which turns the selection into a path and then use that path to wrap copy and pasted text.

The issue is that the path being used is baked into the create text action - it doesn't source from the working path within the project. Obviously the outline of our character changes so we want the text wrap to vary with this outline. I've seen some stuff about variable path selection via a script but don't know how to impliment. Any help is greatly appriciated.

[Lumigraphics]

Can't you do the moving text in After Effects?

[jamess24091030]

After Effects doesn't have the same text wrapping tools, as far as I know. Does it? 

What I mean by text wrapping - because I realize it can be ambiguous is NOT that a line of text follows a path around an object but that a paragraph has natural line breaks that corrispond with the changing shape of the the matte. If you look at the pictures I attached to the original post you'll see what I mean. I can get this effect by copy and pasting into image sepereately - but I'm looking for a way to automate the process.

[Stephen Marsh]

There is nothing to go by. Can you please illustrate the problem?

Can you post screenshots of the path recorded into the action and two or more images path panel where the path differs from the action?

If it's a working path, I'd presume that it would be consistently named in the files and the recorded action. Sorry if  I'm missing the obvious.

[jamess24091030]

Here you go - as you can see the action records the type control points into it - thereby gurenteeing it won't use the newly generated work path by the first two actions. 

   

[jamess24091030]

Okay so....nothing?

[Stephen Marsh]

I misunderstood the original issue as selecting by path item or name. Looking at the screenshots it appears to be something else, but I'm not following or clear on the subject. Can you explain step by step, video or perhaps share assets and action?

[jamess24091030]

Here's what I'm trying to do - I have a character dancing or moving around which I want to "wrap text around". I mean this in the page layout sense of wrap text: create line breaks in the paragraph in such a way that the character.

Photoshop currently has functionality that does exactly this: if you click inside of the current path with the text tool and then paste previously copied text it will do what I want: fill the area inside the path with the text and exclude the area outside of the path.

After Effects, to my knowledge does not have this functionality.

I am looking for a way to automate this process so I can batch process frames to automatically respond to changes in the shape of the matte

The thinking is this: if in After Effects I can generate frames of my matte (Black=area without text, White=area with text) then as long as there is some area that is consistantly white, creating an action where the magic wand clicks in that consistantly white area will create a selection of the matte that works on every frame. The next action is to convert that selection to a path. This works fine. 

Here is the where the problem is: the next step of the action is to create the text inside the newly generated path. However the way this action records is to use the path when the action was recorded - not the current working path. Since the whole point is that the matte of the dancer moves this defeats the purpose.

What is notable about this is that it is different from the way that photoshop actions work with selections: suppose I have an action with a magic wand tool and apply a filter to the resultant selected area: if I batch process a number of different frames the magic wand will produce a number of different selections based on the content of the images and the areas that are being filtered will change.

It is also different than if I just do the first two steps of the action and manually click the text tool in the same spot the action was recorded to do. This produces the desired effect. I did that for about 120 frames so you can see what I'm trying to make happen.

The question is basically: is there some way to make Photoshop use the current working path - not always the same path used to record the action.