• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Multiple Instances of Same Expression: possible?

  Posted by Ron Anderson on February 11, 2014 at 10:49 pm

  Based on my understanding of expressions I don’t think this is possible, but I thought I’d throw it out to the experts to confirm:

  Is there a way to have a layer property automatically take an expression from another layer, in lieu of pasting the same expression repeatedly? I’d essentially like to hack a node-like behavior where I could adjust a single expression and have it be automatically executed by many instances in the same comp.

  The project I’m working on involves making a huge array of pre-comps that can form a grid and/or fly apart based on random()s and various time and distance range settings. I’d love to be able to tweak a single expression to get the behavior I want, and then apply it to all the layers that need it without copy-pasting if possible. I can’t just pass the result of a single expression because each layer needs it’s own individually randomized result.

  It seems like this would save a lot of time and fiddling…a guy can dream, right?

  Thanks in advance!

  George Goodman replied 12 years, 4 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  February 11, 2014 at 11:39 pm

  Short answer–no, you can’t do that. However Edit>Copy Expression Only, select other layers, Paste can speed up the duplication process immensely.

  Also, there’s a hack where you could save the master expression as a string in a hidden text layer, and the other expressions could do an eval() on the text in the text layer, but it has performance issues. Probably not the best plan for a “huge array of pre-comps”.

  Dan
• 

  Ron Anderson

  February 11, 2014 at 11:49 pm

  Gah! Thanks for confirming. At least as I bang my head against the keyboard I will do it with the knowledge that I’m not missing some huge shortcut.

  It would certainly make tweaking much easier if I could see results updated automatically, but I think I’m managing with lots and lots of parameter controls on controller null.

  Thanks!
• 

  George Goodman

  February 12, 2014 at 8:00 pm

  I’ve wanted something like this as well for a while. It could be an ‘expression’ expression controller. That would be really useful. I’d think there must be some limitations there making it not possible, else it probably would have been done. Wouldn’t hurt to add it to the feature requests though.

  “|_ (°_0) _|”

  Sincerely,

  George

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