can I “set first vertex” without closing/altering the path?

[Kyle Hamrick]

I did a quick test, and am experiencing the same thing….

Possible workaround:

– Close your path manually, set desired first vertex, animate stroke only as far as your original path would have taken it (End at 72% instead of 100%)

Also, I tend to do stroke animations this way, if it helps at all:
Create the path on a Shape layer. (First vertex as necessary).
Add mask, use expression to tie mask path to shape path.
Add stroke, set to reveal original. Animate as desired.

Kyle Hamrick

Editor/Motion Graphics Artist

http://www.kylehamrick.com

[Pete Burges]

I am having the same issue, and the workaround unfortunately doesn’t seem to work for me…

Here’s what happens: To simplify the problem, let’s say my mask path is on a clock, with an open curve described from 12 to 6, with points at all hours in between. To begin with, the first vertex is at 6 and a stroke animation along that path travels anti-clockwise to 12. I want to change it so that it begins at 12 and moves clockwise to 6. What happens for me instead is, if I set the first vertex at 12, it just creates a new segment connecting 12 to 6 and continues animating anti-clockwise. So now it’s still animating the wrong way and I have a line across my clock face that I didn’t want.

If I then re-open the mask to remove the offending segment, it resets my first vertex to 6. I’ve tried resetting the first vertex starting from a closed mask, but I get the same result.

BTW if it helps, I got the mask path by layer tracing, not drawing by hand. Does anyone know a way around this…?

[Michael Szalapski]

Copy and paste the path into Illustrator, reverse the path direction there, copy and paste it back into AE.

☺

It’s dumb, but it works.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Pete Burges]

Thanks Michael…I don’t have illustrator, but in principle that might work with some other package that supports bezier splines.

[Cassius Marques]

[Pete Burges] “but in principle that might work with some other package that supports bezier splines.”

Hah! We wish! We’re talking about Adobe’s software here. They lock stuff out between versions of the same application…I bet once you control+c the spline in AE, the memory will get a proprietary code instead of a generic math function. If we were talking about Maxon or companies that don’t take steps to makes things deliberately harder for the user I would have that positive, hopeful expectation too.

Cassius Marques
http://www.zapfilmes.com

[Oleg Pirogov]

[Since AE 2018 and later] you can do this:

1) Duplicate your mask
2) Add this expression to path property:

createPath(points().reverse(), outTangents().reverse(), inTangents().reverse(), false);

This reverses the path.
More precisely, it overwrites a path for the duplicated mash with a newly generated reversed path. Why it matters is that you can’t modify it manually, cause it’s expression-generated. To do so, RMB path property Keyframe Assistant -> Convert Expression to Keyframes (it will create a key for every frame and this may take some time, so you may wanna temporarily shorten your layer duration), then just delete all the generated keys and you’ll have a reversed path you can modify manually.

[Pete Burges]

Cassius- that’s a fair point! Adobe certainly seem to have moved away from ‘optimising your workflow’ towards ‘extorting more of your money’ in recent years. But now they aren’t the only game in town, how much longer can they get away with it?

Oleg- brilliant, thanks so much for that! That script should be native.