Starting with versions 2.3 or greater Legion II has been equipped with a powerful but easy to use opacity mask generator.

 

Opacity or clipping masks are used to make portions of an element or visual either transparent or partially transparent.  Masks uses alpha channel information to specify how the source pixels of the object are blended into the destination target. The transparent portions of the mask indicate the areas where output is hidden, whereas the opaque portions of the mask indicate where the masked object is visible. The difference between opacity and clipping masks are clipping masks can only provide hard sharp edges, whereas an opacity mask allows for varying degrees of opacity within more complex paths.

 

Legion includes simple to use utilities for creating and applying masks globally to the entire program canvas, or ones simply designed for a single asset.

When front projecting directly onto a non-standard screen surface such as a solid architectural structure, it may be important that projected light remains confined to only parts of the surface area we choose. This is where a opacity mask can help us do that.

        

Show producers can attempt to virtually generate the mask for us ahead of time in the studio but more than likely, it will never line up perfectly with the architectural piece once it’s constructed and put in place. This is where Legion has an advantage. We can quickly generate the perfect mask because editing is performed directly on the actual program output space. So once the set is built and projection equipment is in place, we can project the designer tools directly on the real-life surface and work there.     

 

Here is a real-world example:

Generated a complex polygon with 42 separate points, some with radiused corners.

Now with the new masked applied.

Final product.

 

Since this is applied directly to our output space, everything that is now played out to program will only appear within the mask boundaries.