• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Effect Name or index?

  Posted by Ryan Hill on July 20, 2009 at 5:20 am

  So I recently did something with 10 beam effects applied to the same layer. I set the start and end point of each beam according to a formula, based on a variable I called “i.”

  Now, in this case, I just went ahead and set i=1, i=2, i=3 etc. for each beam effect. And this meant I had to set it for both the start point and end point of each.

  But it got me to wondering. Is there a way to either:
  1) Get the numerical index of the effect, in the sense if this beam is the 4th effect applied to this layer in order, then I want to get the number 4.
  2) Get the name of the effect (not the layer) and extract a number from that. (I can easily create beam1 beam2 beam3 just through duplication.)

  Dan Ebberts

  

  replied 16 years, 9 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  July 20, 2009 at 1:12 pm

  You can use propertyGroup() to move up 1 or more levels in the property hierarchy. So to get to the Beam effect level from the Starting or Ending point would be like this:

  thisProperty.propertyGroup(1).propertyIndex

  or,

  thisProperty.propertyGroup(1).name

  Dan

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