• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Expression for link relative position of a stroke to a track/null

  Posted by Gustavo Saliola on September 29, 2015 at 2:52 pm

  Hi everyone. I’m trying to solve this simple problem via expressions (not by precomping). Have this shot with handheld camera of the back of a car. In middle shot, i’ve made several paint strokes covering the license plate. Tracked the camera movement (a minimal x/y pan), created a null, and now i need to aply that movement to all the 12 strokes that made with the clone tool.

  The catch is that i need to maintain all the 12 stroke’s relative positions, not just simply parent them and get off of those original and correct positions.

  I know in my guts that a simple expression exists for this task (And not being forced as i did to manually adjust every single clone stroke’s position keyframes by hand to the place they were, by copy/paste the null’s position).

  Thanks in advance. Hope Dan is around 🙂

  Gustavo Saliola replied 10 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Bryan Woods

  October 2, 2015 at 1:04 am

  I think you’re better off with planar tracking the license plate and then painting on a still thats distorted to the planar tracker’s output. Otherwise, to get this to work in AE I think you might need to track each individual feature you’re painting out so you have positional data for that paint fix, and then apply a paint layer tied to the position value of that tracked feature.
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  Gustavo Saliola

  October 2, 2015 at 7:10 pm

  Thanks Bryan. Normally, i use all of the methods described by you (Mocha, multiple tracks). This time is just a wish for commodity. It’s so simple that i’m sure there’s and expression for that. As i said earlier, a simple expression that maintains the original brush/clone position, but moves linked to a null/position.

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