Watch the FlowBox Follow Shape Feature in Action

FlowBox’s Follow Shape feature looks pretty useful!

I try not to be hyperbolic, but rotoscoping might be a task that few look forward to. Sure lots of people do it for a living day-in and day-out and love it. I’m not one of them. If you are trying to rotoscope something in After Effects, I feel for you. Using After Effects’ bezier and roto-bezier tools are pure and maddening kluge. Artist assisted features help quite a bit. This is why I likely reach for Ae first, and give the roti-brush and matte effects a shot.

Artist assisted features for roto can be found in quite a few applications. Newest as well as promising is FlowBox. The tool promises to be a fundamental shift in VFX workflow. Built to be a rotoscoping and VFX platform, FlowBox has some interesting features.

The Follow Shape function is one of them. follow shape will automatically follow selected shapes or points in a viewer. It doesn’t matter if you have tracking data for it or not. With Follow Shape turned on for the viewer, you don’t have to struggle with keeping the mask in the viewer due to erratic motion of the scene.

It is little things like these that can make an arduous task so much faster, and much more fluid. Have a look at FlowBox in action. The video shows a rotoscope of a face, as the camera moves around the scene. in it, you can see setting up tracking, editing shapes, and how you can keep the item of interest in the viewer at all time, with Follow Shape. Nice!

By the way, the FlowBox team mentioned that the video, In real time, took just 15min – yes, you can do it fast using Flowbox.

1 comment

  1. I’m sticking with Mocha. The point tracking killed this software for me.

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