• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  MAC OS Dock effect

  Posted by Rick Sebeck on February 8, 2006 at 10:06 pm

  I am trying to recreate the OS dock effect of scale an position (just text though). I once created a script in Flash, but this is for video use, and to be honest, I have no idea where that flash script is!

  Anyway.. I am an intermediate AE user (not really played with action scripts) and was wondering if there is some script like way to accomplish this without had key framing all the layers.

  Again the effect would be a list of objects (text) that get “highlighted” one at a time down the list. It would “grow”. thus pushing the other items in the list accordingly.

  Thanks,
  Rick

  P.S. i also have motion if a behavioral solution is easier!

  Guillaume Lefevre replied 14 years, 4 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Colin Braley

  February 8, 2006 at 10:50 pm

  Heres an expression for scale that should do the scale part for you:

  mouse_layer = thisComp.layer(“mouse layer”);//Mouse layer
  beginScale = 100;//Scale begins at this
  endScale = 250;//Scale ends at this
  beginDistance = 200;//Distance to begin magnifying in pixels
  endDistance = 0;//Distance to end magnifying in pixels
  //–Don’t modify below here
  dis = length(this.position, mouse_layer.position);
  val = ease(dis, beginDistance, endDistance, endScale, beginScale);
  [val, val]

  This question has been asked a few times, search the archives for it. Also, you say that you want to alter the position of these layers too? I could probably help you out if you provide more info about how the layers move. I use Windows so I don’t really remember exactly what the Mac Dock looks like.
  ~Colin
• 

  Guillaume Lefevre

  December 14, 2011 at 6:17 pm

  Hi Colin !

  i know it’s a bit late, but if you could help me finding a solution on how to control position of the layers, help would be much appreciated.

  I tried for hours before i figured out that scale didn’t change an object’s width…
  So how can you tell elements to keep the same distance between them when scale isn’t changing one layer’s width?

  Thanks a lot for reading me, really looking forward to find an answer to this problem 🙂

  cheers

  Guillaume

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