hello, i am new here. can anyone explain me how “elf yourself” works? i want to do something like that in a project i am working on. thank you.
Seem like everyone is trying to do something similar these days.
It’s tricky to do. How are you with flash+php+mysql?
As Paul says, it’s not a trivial task to make these.
First you have to be able to store and upload photos from users, and have them manipulated to fit so they need to scale, rotate and pan, and also be able to mask out the face area.
Then you need to overlay your timeline embedded video (or animation) with empty movieclips to load these photos, and then apply a mask. These clips need to accurately follow the motion of the video so there’s a lot of painstaking frame by frame positioning involved.
Then you need further backend work to store the data relevant to each user generated clip, and send out emails etc.
well i am familiar with Mysql, just getting started with flash and with php very little i know.
as you say i have to edit the video and remove the area where user will place his picture an this wil be a “mask”?
do you know any software that can help with the video editing?
(i am sorry for my poor english, its not my mutual language)
In the video you don’t necessarily have to remove anything as the face movieclip is laid on top (normally at a sufficient size to cover the face area). The original photo uploaded has background but you need to isolate the face, so you mask out only the relevant part.
its not that complicated, draw your animation using the bone tool, then learn how to do bitmap manipulation (bitmap data) and then merge (copyPixel) that final image onto the head.