Watch Hands Shadows

Hello to all,

I am wondering if anyone could help me with the settings of watch hands shadows. I have built my watch hands and separate images for the shadows but i would like the shadow to be more realistic, dropping shadow according to the light (left hand side of the watch face).

With the above set up, when the seconds hand for example will be at 10 seconds, the shadow will move away both on X and Y axis, while when it the seconds hand will be at 20 seconds, the shadow will only move Y axis,

I believe it has to do with the inner pivot values of the shadow images but i haven’t been able to create a realistic effect. Could anyone support on this?

Thank you very much
Kind Regards

I, too, am interested in how to make a second hand shadow more realistic with the gyro settings. In my current project, the seconds shadow has separate X and Y Inner Pivots set from -16px to +16px, within the full -+90 degree range. It looks more pronounced in the GWS while on the wrist I can barely see the differences.

By the way, another member of the forum had previously posted the tag expressions for images to mimic the shadow movements within the “Rotate Angle” settings, for which I am grateful:

Hour shadow:
[H]*30+[m]/2

Minute shadow:
[m]*6+[s]/10

Seconds shadow:
[s]*6

Hello,
the simplest way of making shadow for hands is to duplicate the hand, put it below the actual hand layer, set its color to black, reduce opacity and shift it few pixels down or even to side. To improve it, prepare the black duplicate image with light blur. I guess you know this already, but still maybe want to check attached example (rename it from .zip to .gwd first).HandShadow.zip (430.6 KB)


I guess making the shade appear to fall from different directions during the hand rotation wont make it look more realistic. Making the shade shift using gyro effect could slightly improve it. But to apply gyro, it needs to be made using already mentioned image elements (turned with expressions) instead of hand elements. Same effect would be needed to apply on all hands shadows then (stronger for the top hand, subtler for the bottom hand).

Another solution that could work is to create a handle for the seconds and 3 handles for the shadows, then modify the position of each one to simulate the shadow, you would have 1 on the right, 1 below and 1 on the left, then using a tag you can make the shadows appear and disappear in (x) time.

Hey, any way to mask out the HOUR and MINUTE hands on the SECOND hand copy that is being used as a drop shadow?

Thanks!

Can you please better explain what are you trying to do? The second hand is usually the top one (above all others) and casts shadow on everything, on the dial and on the underlying hands as well.

Hey, Peter

I can assume this question was for me, so here goes.

  • I have 2 SECOND hands. One as the ACTUAL, and one as an offset DROP SHADOW below
  • I have a watch face that is visually, pretty deep, with tall hour markers at 12, 3, 6, 9
  • I have made a mask of the markers that I use to block the DS hand from showing on those markers since the second hand and those markers, would have a very slight clearance.
  • The same would be for the MINUTE and HOUR hand.

So, how do I mask the DS SECOND HAND from showing on the MINUTE and HOUR hands, the same as I did with the hour markers?

Thanks.

Cant you just shift the seconds drop shadow layer below the other layers you dont want to it to “cast” shadow upon?

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