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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Expressions Arraying ‘instances’ of an animated comp (growing leaves) around a path (branches)…

  • Arraying ‘instances’ of an animated comp (growing leaves) around a path (branches)…

    Posted by Jim Lefevre on August 31, 2011 at 8:16 am

    Hello there…

    The project I’m working on involves a tree which at various points through the piece goes through four seasons (and at quite a few times)

    Spring – leaves grow, blossom grows
    Summer – blossom disappears
    Autumn – leaves go brown
    Winter – leaves disappear

    The tree is fairly illustrative and so the amount of leaves we are talking about isn’t enormous but it’ll probably be about 50/60

    I have a comp for the leaves (LEAF.COMP)with the Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter animation and what I would like to do, in theory, is create some paths for branches and then ‘array’ the LEAF.COMP up and down the paths a bit like the path text effect.

    Does anyone think this is possible or know of any similar approaches?

    I was thinking of abusing the trapcode/particular effect as in some ways there’s a similar thing I need within that of staggering/offsetting the animation of each layer but I got a bit lost in the ‘placement’ of the particles so am turning to the idea of expressions….

    Many many thanks in advance!!

    jim

    http://www.jimlefevre.com

    Jim Lefevre replied 14 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Dan Ebberts

    August 31, 2011 at 6:44 pm

    You can paste a path into the position property of a null, which will give you a 2-second animation along the path Then you can get positions at various percentages of the path, like this:

    pct = 33; // get point 33% along path
    thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).transform.position.valueAtTime(pct*2/100)

    Dan

  • Jim Lefevre

    October 10, 2011 at 8:54 am

    Dan!

    I’m so sorry I didn’t reply to this earlier, I can’t think why I didn’t, thanks so much for the reply!

    It’s more than useful as I also think I understood the script too! Which is almost a first!

    Very clever!

    Thanks,

    Jim

    http://www.jimlefevre.com

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