Animating several brush stroke offset time expression

[John Mangual]

I have AE CS6 and I get error when applying expression. I though this script is what i’m looking for but maybe I’m going about it wrong.

Basically I’m trying to apply a stroke using an expression so i can manipulate it. Ways I plan to manipulate them is adding more strokes offset from the previous (using same contour). I want to have all strokes, say 2px width and 10px apart. Another plan is to increase/decrease space after each stroke.

So..
1st stroke is 10px offset
2nd stroke is 9px offset
3 is 8 and so on.

I’m able to achieve this manually but very time consuming as you can imagine. Is this feasible or should i stick to manual?

Thanks.

[Dan Ebberts]

What you’re asking is a little vague, but I think it’s do-able (and should work fine in CS6). Here’s a quick example. Create a brush stroke on a layer. Add this expression to the Position property of the Brush’s (not the Layer’s) Transforms:

myIdx = thisProperty.propertyGroup(2).propertyIndex;
delta = [(myIdx – 1)*10,0]
value + delta

Duplicate the brush a bunch of times. Each new brush should be offset 10 pixels to the right of the previous brush.

Dan

[John Mangual]

Sorry for the confusion. Here is what i want to do.(attached)

Can this be done with “Stroke Effect”, not brush, in an expression?

[Dan Ebberts]

The only way I can think of to do that would require a script to do the mask expansion. It would be straightforward I think, but a bit of work. Maybe someone else will have a better idea.

Dan

[John Mangual]

Thanks for the idea. I gave it a shot but couldn’t really get it to work. Guess I’ll go back to the manual method.

Is there an expression just to add a stroke i can play around with?

[Dan Ebberts]

No, expressions can’t create anything–they can only manipulate the value of the property hosting the expression.

Dan