• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Delay parenting? – not “follow the leader” kind

  Posted by Thomas Ginelli on January 4, 2012 at 2:08 pm

  Hello!

  I have 100+ layers laid out in a grid, rotating around a null in the centre of the screen.

  What I would like to achieve is to randomly delay the start of each parented layer when the parent itself is starting to spin.

  “follow the leader”-type scripting does not work since the layers are not sharing pivot positions, and are spinning in offset.

  I guess that inserting a null in the hierarchy between the centre animated null and the target layer (in the layer’s position) would work – I could then delay the movement between the layer and the null using “follow the leader” scripting.

  Still I’m wondering if that can be avoided, for I have hundreds of layers in my comp and would hate to create separate nulls for all of them…

  Thomas Ginelli replied 14 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  January 4, 2012 at 3:57 pm

  Play around with this and see if it gets you close to what you’re after:

  seedRandom(index,true);
  maxDelay = 1;
  delay = random(maxDelay);
  parent.fromWorld(toWorld(anchorPoint,time-delay))

  Dan
• 

  Thomas Ginelli

  January 5, 2012 at 10:05 am

  Guess what… it got me right where I wanted to be!

  Thank you! (again;)

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up