Aligning images along a circular plane and then animating them into view. Any idea how?

[Darby Edelen]

You could go about this using expressions, that would probably be the high road. Ask on the expressions board for more information.

Personally, I would just pre-compose all of the logos in a composition, make them all 3D layers and arrange them around the center point of the composition. Set them to Auto-Orient to camera and put a camera at the center of the comp. You can then drag this pre-comp into another composition and turn the 3D switch and Collapse Transformations layer switches on. As long as the layers are distributed around the center point of the pre-comp where the camera they are orienting to is located, you will end up with a perfectly oriented circle (or other arrangement) of logos.

The pre-composing and Auto-Orient to camera is just a clever way of getting the layers to all face a particular point. You could also do this with the lookAt() function. There are other expressions that could be used to define a circle/oval arrangement for the layers, but I’ll leave that for the expressions forum =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[David Franklin]

Arranging the logos around the center point sounds a lot like what was done in the “ring of cows” tutorial:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/dewaele_tielman/simple_ring/index.html

The only issue is that you want an oval, not a ring. And if the logos are just sitting in an oval in z-space, you have a problem when you rotate them: some points of the oval wind up closer or farther from the camera, making the logos varying sizes.

A completely different approach I just tried very quickly would be to define your oval path using a mask, then copy the “mask shape” property and paste that info into the “position” property of a null object. This creates a null object that is moving along an oval path. The default on my machine created a 2 second round-trip, but you can alt-click the keyframes and drag the right keyframe out to however long you want the round-trip to take.

Then for each logo in the comp, option click the stopwatch and insert the following simple expression into the position value: thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).position.valueAtTime(time+index);

This spaces the logos out at 1 second increments along the path.

Now select all the logos, go to Layer > Transform > Auto-Orient, and click “Orient Along Path”. (If you orient to camera, all the logos keep re-orienting as they spin around the oval).

Of course now everything is happing in the wrong axis. Since I can’t get the null’s path to rotate in z space, I used the camera tool to rotate the camera 90 degrees so it’s pointing up at the ring, and finally selected all the logo layers and rotated them +90 in both x rotation and z rotation.

What I got was a smooth moving 3-D oval ring of logos which are pointed at the camera as they pass, but not when they are on the back side of the loop. All you’d have to do from there is use Hold keyframes to stop the null as each logo reaches the point in front of the camera, then let it resume its path.

Having written all that out, I’m sure there must be a more elegant solution, but it’s apparently above my skill level!

Anyone else?