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split flap sign expression advice
I’m working on a permanent video installation that will be part of a new music venue. the video will simulate one of those old train station signs but instead of locations and rail numbers it will show upcoming bands and dates.
I have the mechanics worked out pretty well where I have one comp that has text on each side (front and back) divided by a solid. That is then duplicated 3 times in the next comp up with the top one flipping down in 3d through keyframes. every minute or so I want the sign to go through the flipping motion for 20 seconds or so and resting on the names and dates that are entered in. I’m making it so it will be very easy for people at the venue to just edit comps with text and ignore the rest.
at the moment I am just baking in a bunch of letters and numbers to flip through but i would love it if there was a way to generate the letters and numbers sequentially (or randomly if that is significantly easier) for each flap and finally rest on the appropriate characters that are typed in.It’s a little hard to explain what the problem is, essentially because each flap is 3 duplicates of one comp and then the next rotation is a copy of that moved down on the timeline with the text changed in a duplicate of that comp i would need an expression that would generate the same character on the back text as the character on the front text of the comp previous in the timeline.
I’m confusing myself even writing this. I can try to explain better if anyone wants to take a crack at it. -
4 Replies
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You didn’t mention if you’ve tried this, but I think using a Character Offset animator would be a good place to start.
Dan
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Thanks Dan
yes, i did try character offset but is there a way to offset the character on one comp based on the character from another comp? each comp’s character shouldn’t actually change. they should just be higher than the one before.I’ve had an idea that if nothing else might illustrate what i want it to do. I might make a comp that goes through each letter flipping down from a-z and one for each numer 1-9. then i would need an expression that tells the animation to stop when it reaches the point of that animation that correspondes to the letter or number that they need displayed. I don’t even know if after effects can do this but that might give you an idea of what i want it to basically look like.
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There might be better ways to do it, but this should offset all the characters in the Text layer in Comp 1 by one character:
s = comp("Comp 1").layer("Text").text.sourceText;
str = "";
for (i = 0; i < s.length; i++){
c =String.fromCharCode( s.charCodeAt(i)+1);
str += c;
}
str
Dan
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thanks. i’ll give that a shot
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