Comparing Values from infinite amount of Layers

[Dan Ebberts]

The expression would need some way to figure out the range of layers it needs to examine. It’s pretty easy if all layers in the comp are participating, otherwise you might need some distinguishing feature in the layer’s name (maybe the name of each participating layer starts with an underscore character, for example). The logic would be somewhat simplified if the participating layers were contiguous, but it should still be do-able if not.

Then you just have to create a loop that looks at all participating layers.

Dan

[Andy Kreutzberg]

Hi Dan, thanks for your input. I will continue working on this by monday and then see how i can manage it. The layers in question would be duplicated in an index range between layer 7 and layer index thisComp.numLayers-5. Subtracting (thisComp.numLayers-5)-7 should give the amount of duplicated layers. So i guess somewhere in there is the solution. The index range for the duplicates is definitely defineable.

[Andy Kreutzberg]

So here is the details of the situation:

the first layer carrying the expression mentioned before always has the index of 8 (duplicating this layer will move the duplicate to index 8 and the original down to 9 though, not sure if thats important). After this index 8 layer that needs to be duplicated, there is a total of 5 layers with an index range from 9 to 13. When Layer 8 is duplicated, the index numbers for these layers are increasing of course. So basically, the range of the layers that need to be looked at is 8 to (number of layers) -5. Now i have the problem that i don’t know how to define this range and keep it infinite.

The thing is, each new layer will add an individual value to the calculation. How would the expression from post one look like with this defined range of layers, with each individual value from each new duplicate of layer 8 adding into the calculation?

[Dan Ebberts]

I haven’t tested this, so it may not be perfect, but I think it will look like this:


startIdx = 8;
stopIdx = thisComp.numLayers - 5;
max = thisComp.layer("CONTROLLER").effect("characters")("Slider");
n = 0;
for (idx = startIdx; idx <= stopIdx; idx++){
txt = thisComp.layer(idx).text.sourceText.split("\r");
for (i = 0; i < txt.length; i++) n = Math.max(n, txt[i].length);
}
if (n>max)
value*max/n
else
value


Dan

[Andy Kreutzberg]

Hey Dan, thank you very much for looking into this. Your expression seems to do what it should, however, i get an error “After Effects Error: invalid text transaction (26::386) after duplicating Layer 8 and double clicking the duplicate. So this error basically appears whenever i want to change the text of the duplicate while changing the originals text seems to yield no errors. I had that before with some expressions referring to sourceText as a floating variable.

[Andy Kreutzberg]

No worries, Dan! I have assigned an on/off switch in the form of a checkbox for this auto-scaler and wrapped your expression with an if/else statement. Now the error seems to have been gone. If it should happen again, i will just use the on/off switch to apply the feature. That should work. Thanks!

[Andy Kreutzberg]

Hey again,

i just tried to play with the above code a little.

startIdx = 8;
stopIdx = thisComp.numLayers – 5;
n = 0;
for (idx = startIdx; idx <= stopIdx; idx++){
txt = thisComp.layer(idx).text.sourceText.split(“r”);
for (i = 0; i < txt.length; i++) n = Math.max(n, txt[i].length);

I wanted to change it into a counter for the largest amount of line breaks in any of the text layers within the index range and output that amount as a number on a slider control. So i replaced the following line

txt = thisComp.layer(idx).text.sourceText.split(“r”)

by this line:

thisComp.layer(idx).text.sourceText.split(/n|r/);

However, the output for the variable n is a fixed number 17. I have tried to play around with this a bit further, but no matter what i change, i either get a fixed number, an error or the number of line breaks of the text layer with the highest index. I think i am missing a detail somewhere. Whenever i think i got it, something just does not work out.

[Dan Ebberts]

I’m not sure what you’re trying to do with your change to the .split() argument. It needs to be a string (in double or single quotes) and whatever you put in there, the text will be split wherever there’s an occurance of that entire string.

Dan

[Andy Kreutzberg]

Basically, the line thisComp.layer(index).text.sourceText.split(/n|r/).length gives me the number of line breaks for a text. So i just wanted to put that into the code that looks at the range of layers to give me the maximum value for the line breaks of all the participating layers. So basically, i want to get the number of line breaks from the layer with the most line breaks.

[Dan Ebberts]

Ah. I didn’t realize that you could use a Reg Exp as the argument to split(). So do the “n” and “r” have backslashes in front of them (they don’t show up here in your post)?

Dan