• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Divide Layer into equal parts with masks – Script/Expression?

  Posted by Andy Hill on January 21, 2014 at 11:30 pm

  Hi everyone,

  I’ve searched high and low for an automated way to do this but to no avail, does anyone know if there is a way, script or expression, to divide a solid/shape/comp into equal parts using masks?

  I.E:

  I have a solid layer of 500px by 500px and would like to cut the layer up into 25 50px by 50px squares using masks.

  I’ve manually done it a few times now by altering each mask then using the MaskToLayers script to centre the anchor point then animating from there.

  Any pointers would be awesome.

  Cheers,
  Andy

  Andy Hill replied 11 years, 9 months ago 5 Members · 7 Replies
• 7 Replies

• 

  Todd Kopriva

  January 22, 2014 at 1:43 am

  What are you going to do next? It may be that the Card Wipe or Card Dance effects will get you where you need ro go without actually cutting the layer up with masks.

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  Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
  After Effects quality engineering
  After Effects team blog
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• 

  Jason Jantzen

  January 22, 2014 at 4:24 pm

  What I usually do, and what I did here at about :08 into the video https://vimeo.com/66477211 is make a grid in Illustrator and copy that into AE. Make sure you’re copying just the squares of the grid. I think AI creates the grid with an outline around the whole thing.

  Jason Jantzen
  vimeo.com/jasonj

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• 

  David Cabestany

  January 22, 2014 at 4:47 pm

  There’s a ascript for that, it’s called masksToLayers.
• 

  Xavier Gomez

  January 22, 2014 at 6:55 pm

  There is a script by Jeff Almasol, rd: Slicer, that does precisely that.
  However for some reason his site, https://www.redefinery.com/ae/, has been ‘refocusing’ for a while now.

  Xavier.
• 

  Andy Hill

  February 5, 2014 at 12:23 pm

  Thanks guys,

  I ended up using Illustrator to create the parts then using a cascading expression for the rotation.

  Cheers,
  Andy
• 

  Todd Kopriva

  September 5, 2014 at 9:22 pm

  Jeff Almasol’s website is back up, and he’s making his scripts available again:
  https://bit.ly/AE_RD_scripts

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  Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
  After Effects quality engineering
  After Effects team blog
  ———————————————————————————————————
• 

  Andy Hill

  September 9, 2014 at 11:18 am

  Great stuff,

  Thanks for updating this 🙂

  Andy

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