Sensor Animation

[jasonjam]

Hello,

I'm hoping someone can guide me on the best way to animate an adaptive cruise control sensor.

Please take a look at this 3-D video for the animation reference- Adaptive Cruise Control Audi - YouTube

The final animation won't be in 3-D.

I need to animate the bars from the attached reference.

Thanks.

[Mylenium]

Effects --> Generate --> Radio Waves and a bit of masking and pre-comping.

Mylenium

[jasonjam]

Cool. This might work. Can you help me on how do rotate the radio wave so looks like my graphic? I can't seem to figure that out.

[Mylenium]

No need to rotate anything. Just set a suitably low side count on the polygon shape or create a rectangular mask with the right orientation and feed it into the effect. Of course you can always rotate the pre-comp layer just as well, since you will have to mask it anyway.

Mylenium

[jasonjam]

That is starting to look like what I need but the pulse starts from the middle. I need the pulse to start from right to left. Attached is a shot of my desktop.

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

You can move the producer point, can you not? You need to spend some time with the plug-in and learn how it works. Even if the producer point was static, you could still pre-compose the whole layer and mask it, so only one side remains, which is what I would do, anyway - create a large square comp, tweak the wave parameters, use the pre-comp as a layer in the parent comp and mask out the "cone" using a mask or a symetrrical radial wipe. And again, that also takes care of any alignment and orientation issues because you can simply rotate and move the layer as a whole.

Mylenium

[jasonjam]

Thanks for responding and all your help! I got it looking good.