• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Looping 4-frame pixel animations with weird bugs?

  Posted by Tony Villanen on February 23, 2010 at 3:36 pm

  Hello everyone.
  My first post here in many years.

  Ok, I’m currently doing a arcade-game look-a-like music video with a lot of pixel-sprite animations of various frame lenghts.

  When I tried getting the first main pixel-running-man animation to loop I ran into odd problems.

  First of all I did a 4 frame animation in a comp.
  Then I move that comp to the main comp.
  Applied time remapping to the anim comp and then chose the loopOut(type = “cycle”, numKeyframes = 4) and extended the layer running length.

  First I get the classical 1 frame missing after 4 frames after that I get the “empty” frame effect sporadicly here and there but not in any specific order. I tend to notice them specially somewhere between the first few seconds to 40 seconds.

  It confuses me a lot, even TimeRemapping confuses me 🙂

  Any ideas how I might solve this very annoying dilemma?
  I’ve tried reading different articles about this but nobody mentions running into more empty frames. I’ve a newbie when it comes to all this.

  If somebody has little time over please look at my AE CS4 project file with the included animation (it’s only 24kb zipped)
  I’ve created a short link for it https://bit.ly/9Iv6j6

  Thank you for any help.

  /Tony

  Dan Ebberts replied 16 years, 6 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  February 23, 2010 at 8:11 pm

  After you enable time remapping, go to frame 3 and set a keyframe there (don’t change the value). Then go to frame 4 and set the value of that keyframe to 0. Then loopOut() should do the trick.

  Dan
• 

  Tony Villanen

  February 23, 2010 at 8:28 pm

  Thanx Dan, it worked like a charm! I never understood this properly in your old butterfly article. Thank you very much!

  A little follow up question. Do I have any way now of controlling the speed of this or would that require another pre-comp and TimeRemapping? Just for tests sake I tried what happened if I moved the keyframes futher away but it just gave some funky behaviour 🙂
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  February 24, 2010 at 12:51 am

  I think the way you suggest would be the easiest, although it should be possible to write a different time remapping expression (one that doesn’t use loopOut()) that calulates the current frame based on some external control (like a slider). You’d have to use linear keyframes on the slider and the code would be messy accumulator type thing, but I think it could be done.

  Dan

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