• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  pick individual letters based on comp frame

  Posted by Mike Park on September 23, 2009 at 2:19 pm

  Hey guys,

  I am trying to come up with the easiest way to do this. I have a couple of thoughts, but they are not as efficient as I would like, so, I am asking for some help.

  What I want to do is break down a string of characters in a comp so that each individual letter in the string displays in the same position in the comp on a seperate frame. For example: “Help” would display “H” on frame one, “e” on frame 2…you get the idea.

  I thought about using an expression to convert the characters to ascii and then driving a character value animator from the ascii. This would work, but I am stuck on the expression part.

  Any ideas?

  Thanks in advance for your input.

  Mike Park

  Mike Park replied 16 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Mike Park

  September 23, 2009 at 3:04 pm

  Dan,

  I see you have a script on your website which is pretty darn close. It reads lines of text and creates new layers from an external text source. This would be ideal, just need to read individual characters and spaces. Also, instead of creating new layers, although this would work, could it just display the selected character?

  Thanks
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  September 23, 2009 at 3:16 pm

  Does a source text expression like this do what you’re after?

  myString = “hello world”;

  f = timeToFrames();
  idx = Math.min(myString.length-1,f);
  myString[idx]

  Dan
• 

  Mike Park

  September 23, 2009 at 3:23 pm

  Yep,

  You are the MAN! Thanks so much.

  Best,

  Mike

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