• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  storing property info into a variable

  Posted by Mike Overbeck on October 29, 2013 at 9:59 pm

  I am working on an expression that allows many animated properties of a layer to be driven by the same properties of a master layer. I’d be applying this expression to many layers with many animated properties. But I am trying to store this in one universal expression to avoid excessive pickwhipping.
  For example, when the expression is applied to the property:
  layerStyle.outerGlow.opacity
  the expression should automatically reference the same property of the master layer.
  I think I need to store the property’s full name into a variable, but using ‘thisProperty.name’ would only give me “opacity” in this example.
  Any ideas? Is there some basic function for this that I just haven’t found?

  Mike Overbeck replied 12 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Mike Overbeck

  October 30, 2013 at 4:07 am

  I was putting together some code that would hamfist these properties and property groups into arrays with the .name function until I realized the resulting formatting is not useable. All .name results capitalize the first letter and multi-word props are separated with spaces. I don’t know the purpose of the .name function.
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  October 30, 2013 at 4:34 pm

  I think you can use the result of .name. These both work:

  prop = thisComp.layer(“Layer 1”).layerStyle.innerGlow.gradientSmoothness;

  prop = thisComp.layer(“Layer 1”)(“Layer Styles”)(“Inner Glow”)(“Gradient Smoothness”);

  I assume you’ve figured out that you can use prop.propertyGroup(n).name to move up the chain to get the names of the parent properties. I guess you would keep going until the name you get back is the same as the layer’s name, although there may be a more reliable way to know you’re finished.

  Dan
• 

  Mike Overbeck

  November 5, 2013 at 1:41 am

  Thanks for the reply Dan! Ah, using non-compact naming might do it!
  Here is some script that I was working on to ride up the group chain and add it to the array.

  function groupCheck(x){
try {
return thisProperty.propertyGroup(x).name
}
catch(err){
return false
}
};
fullgroup = [];
for (var i = 4; i > 0; i--){
if (groupCheck(i) != false && groupCheck(i) != thisLayer.name){
fullgroup.push(groupCheck(i))
}
}

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