RG Corner Pin plug-in: Pin groups

This page discusses the controls that directly create or affect the pinning. There are two primary categories that mirror each other, the To Pins group and From Pins group. The To/From Offset groups do subtle adjustments and there's a Wireframe Color control for easier viewing. You can do secondary transformations with the Reposition group.

About Warp's To/From Pins

Why do we have two Pin groups? By having two selectable groups with two warping destinations, you get the ability to point to the exact points of the layer and are not constrained by what the original layer’s size was, it respects that output warp mask. The To Pin aligns exactly with where you expect it to align.

To/From Pins groups in Warp Corner Pin.

Compare to AE Corner Pin plug-in

To get a good idea of what our plug-in can do, let's briefly compare Red Giant Warp's primary Corner Pin settings (shown above) to the settings in After Effects' built-in Corner Pin plug-in (shown below).

The After Effects Corner Pin takes four points of an image and lets you map them against four points of another object. But let's say that you don't want to use the entire rectangular area of the image, and you have created a mask on your image, as with our Coffee Cup example. That mask is respected by AE's Corner Pin but the points used for the input layer are still the original points of the image, not the points of the mask.

This creates a compositing problem. The point you use to pin for a masked object is not on the edge of the mask, which means you will have to eye ball the mask edges to match target edges. There's also no labeling on your points in the Project Window, only the standard AE cross-hair symbol to designate the point location, which adds to the confusion of using this AE tool. In contrast, our Corner Pin plug-in lets you choose those mask points exactly, and labels all of the edges and areas that you are working with.

Single pin group in After Effects' Corner Pin interface.

To Pins group

The To Pins control group is active by default. Its state coordinates with the default setting of the Overlay Mode, which is set to Show To Pins. It also coordinates with the default setting of View Mode, which is set to Both Pins Warp. Both settings allow you to work with the To image source immediately. The auto-creation of the To Pins defaults to the center of the layer.

In fact, the To Pins are automatically generated by the plug-in when it is first applied. In our examples below, this is what we get when we first apply the plug-in to an image. The To Pins are set to the corners of the bounding box of each graphic. From there, you need to move the To Pins to the corners of the graphic that you are mapping to. In our examples, this is our Billboard graphic.

We are pinning a Flower graphic to this Billboard image. The To Pins are automatically created by the plug-in when it is first applied. These pins start at the corners of the bounding box of the Flower image. We want to pin them to the corners of the Billboard image. The pinning is done correctly by adjusting the values of our To Pins, and the result looks great.

Unlike the Flower, this Coffee Cup graphic has a mask. The To Pins recognize the corners of the bounding box of the Coffee Cup image, not the Coffee Cup mask. This means the pinning is technically correct but the final result is not what we want. We want to recognize the mask that is contained within the image, and for that we will need to use the From Pins group.

From Pins group

The From Pins control group is grayed out (inactive) by default. To make it active, you will change the Overlay Mode to Show From Pins or Show Both Pins.

If you are working with a masked object (which we can also call a 'warped source', your first step will generally be to go into the From Pins group and set the corner of those pins to match your mask. That allows you to use the edges of the mask as the pinned image, rather than the bounding box of the entire graphic that's been masked. This is the case with our Coffee Cup image.

If you are working with an image that is not masked, then you may not have to adjust the From Pins image. You should be able to just adjust the To Pins. This is the case with our Flower image.

The Coffee Cup graphic needed its From Pins adjusted. By moving the From Pins from the corners of the graphic to the corners of the mask, the masked area was recognized and pinned correctly to the Billboard.

Upper Left, Upper Right, Lower Left, Lower Right

For both To and From Pins, you can manually or numerically set the pin points. These four controls are pretty simple and operate exactly like the pin settings in AE's Corner Pin plug-in. You can click and drag the points in the project window, or you can type in a numeric value, or you can use their cross-hair controls and drag those around the project window. Pretty standard stuff.

Upper, Lower controls for To Pins.

Offsets, To Pins and From Pins

The eight Offsets controls create an offset from the Pin points themselves. There is a group of Offsets in the To Pins group and a separate group in the From Pins group. Most likely you are only going to apply this offset to the To Pins, but we wanted to give you this option, just in case.

Generally, you will use these controls when you are working with tracking data that was built outside of our plug-in, like tracking data imported from Mocha AE or tracking data copied or linked from After Effect's built-in Motion Tracker. The Upper Left and Upper Right X and Y coordinates come in from the tracking markers that are outside the area in which you do the pinning. This is another control for which it's good to pay attention to Grow Bounds. The Grow Bounds control may need to be adjusted so you can see where the image is.

Here's a good example of using the Offsets: Let's say you have a shot of a TV screen over which the camera is panning. You want to put an image inside the TV screen. The tracking points are the corners of the TV box, those corners have a rounded bevel, and there are tracking markers on the outside of that bevel. This means the points that you are tracking are slightly different than the points that are going to be used as To Pin points. Using the Offset function will subtly adjust the pinning technique.

Wireframe Color

Constrains the color of the wrap wireframe. Makes it easier to see the wireframe against different background colors, depending upon what your project looks like. Let’s say your project is light, you want to change the To Pins wireframe to green to see it better.

This outline is yellow by default. This is also the default color of the mask displayed by After Effects, so pay attention to the outlines that are marked with a Pin label.

At left, the default wireframe colors. At right, custom colors have been chosen.