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Is it possible to make an array available to other layers via expressions
Hi everybody
I have written an expression to write an array of non repeating values lets say from 1 to 20 into an array like in the attached code (Put this to an expression slider control)It works pretty well. But how you can see, the only possibility I saw for saving these values and make them accessible was by connecting each value to a specific frame in the time line(“my_array[t];” access it via the “valueAtTime” expression)
But this can lead to very long expression calculation times, because every frame has to calculate all the calculations from scratch.
Is there a way, other layers can link to specific values of a more than 4 dimensions array via expressions directly.
Something like:
thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”).var(my_array[5]);Hope this is clear enough. Otherwise please ask.
thanks so much.
tot = 20;
t = timeToFrames(time);
pool =[];
my_array = [];if (t<1||t>tot){123456}else{
seedRandom(1,true);
for (i=0;i -
3 Replies
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I think the closest you can come would be to create an expression on a text layer that creates the array as, for example, comma-separated text. Then your receiving expression retrieves the text string, does a .split(“,”) to break the text into an array of strings, and then a parseInt() to convert the desired element to a number. I don’t know if the performance would be any better that what you have though.
Dan
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Hallo Dan
thanks for your reply, I tested your way and the performance seems in fact to be even worse.
That means that long arrays are not meant to be stored and accessible via expressions in a proper way, aren´t they?
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That’s correct. Expressions can’t really store anything and can only communicate with other expressions via the calculated value of the property hosting the expression.
Dan
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