Group and layer order, 206 group and layer order – Apple Motion 5.1.1 User Manual
Page 206
Chapter 7
Basic compositing
206
Additional controls in the HUD let you change each selected layer’s opacity, blend mode, and
drop shadow settings.
The onscreen controls and the HUD controls correspond to parameters that appear in the
Properties Inspector. Adjustments made in the Canvas are simultaneously updated in the
Inspector and HUD, and vice versa. For example, if you’re using the Select/Transform tool and you
change a layer’s scale by dragging its corner handles in the Canvas, the layer’s Scale parameter is
updated in the Properties Inspector.
When you begin to lay out a composition, it’s a good idea to start by creating a static layout
of your project that represents how it looks at the beginning, end, or at a particular moment
in time. In addition to manipulating the geometry of layers in your project, you can also alter
their opacity to adjust how overlapping elements of your layout merge together. Blend modes
provide further control over the appearance of overlapping layers, accentuating or stylizing the
colors of the topmost layers based on the colors of underlying layers.
After you create an initial layout, you can animate the layers you’ve added to set your project
in Motion. For more information about animating layers and their properties, see
on page 439.
To learn more about compositing, choose a topic in the Help table of contents (the sidebar to
the left of this window).
Group and layer order
In the Motion workspace, every project is visually represented by a Project object at the top of
the Layers list. Beneath the Project object are the groups, image layers, and effects objects that
make up your project. Except for cameras, lights, and rigs, all layers and objects in the Layers list
must be contained in a group.
In a purely 2D project, the order in which layers and groups appear in the Layers list (known as
the layer order) determines which image layers appear in front of others in the Canvas. Before
you use the tools described in this chapter, you should arrange the layers and groups in your
project so they appear in the proper order. For information about layer order, see
on page 158.
Objects and layers
In Motion, any element that appears stacked in the Layers list (and Timeline) is an object. Objects
encompass the entire range of images, effects, video clips, audio clips, lights, cameras, and other
items that combine to form a finished composite. A layer is a special class of object defined as
any image-based element—a movie clip, a still image, a shape, text, a particle system, a replicator,
and so on—that is visible in the Canvas. For example, a rotating a triangle shape is a layer, but
the behavior object that animates it is not; a sepia-tone video clip is a layer, but the Sepia filter
that makes it so warmly old-timey is not. In the Motion documentation, the term object is often
used to describe the superset of all manipulable elements that act upon and form a composition.
Layer, however, always refers to the image-based elements acted upon.
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