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4x4x4 video cube
Hey people,
So I’m building a video using a giant 3D Cube shaped by 4 cubes high, 4 wide, and 4 deep leaving some space in between the cubes. Every face of every cube is going to have a video or a picture. There’s only 6 faces, duplicated into all cubes.
I already built the cube and I’m controlling it using null objects as parents for every row and one for the whole cube.
I want to start the video with all cubes stuck together to eliminate the space in between and appear to be one single giant cube, then I want to separate them as if it was breaking apart into the 64 cubes.
My problem is I don’t know how to stick them together and separate them without having to animate one by one cube and edit the position values. Any ideas?
Thank you,
Gerardo. -
3 Replies
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I’m not an expression expert by any means, but here’s my 2 cents.
1. Make a new layer and apply the “slider” effect.
2. Name that layer “slider”
3. Choose one of your video layers and put this expression into the anchor point value:x = anchorPoint[0];
y = anchorPoint[1];
z = thisComp.layer(“slider”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
[x, y, z]4. Copy and paste this anchor point expression to all video layers.
5. You should now be able to move all of the layers by just animating the slider value.Hope that works for you.
-Kevin
PS I am sure there is a simpler expression, but if it works, it works.
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Zaxwerks -
Thanks a lot Kevin, the solution did work to move all the layers with a single slider.
But they all move to one side simultaneously. I would like them to move in different directions, as they should move from a center to the outer space, and then again back into the center.
Do you think that same expression can be altered to achieve that?
Thank you,
Gerardo. -
You would somehow have to throw a variable into each layer’s equation. I’m not at my office so I can’t play around with AE right now. I’m not the best at expressions, so we might be at the limit of my ability to help. I would advise you to post this one in the AE expressions forum. There are a lot of brains bigger than mine in there (Dan Ebberts & Filip Vandueren usually help me out when I’m stuck.)
Good luck
System Setup (for a more detailed list, see my profile)
HARDWARE
Mac Pro 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
9GB Memory
Two 16x SuperDrives
Dual-channel 2Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card
Apple Cinema HD Display (23″ flat panel)
ATI Radeon X1900 XT Graphics Card
AJA Kona LHe SD/HD capture card
Apple Xserve Raid 5.6TBSOFTWARE
Mac OS X 10.4.11
Final Cut Pro Studio 2
After Effects CS3
Photoshop CS3
Illustrator CS3
Boris Continuum 5
Sapphire Plug Ins
Roxio Toast
Digital Anarchy Anarchist Suite
ParticleIllusion 3.0
Trapcode
Zaxwerks
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