expression for position

[Filip Vandueren]

Any Javascript/ECMA-script site or book should give you a good clue as to the basic syntax of the language.
Coming from PHP it shouldn’t be too difficult.
Be sure you understand After effects by itself, because what good is it trying to understand what the Object Model is of the app…

Once you know After Effects, the manual is pretty clear about most objects and methods.
A few excpetions are a.o. “Layer Space transformations” and the Noise-, loop- and Wiggle-functions, they’re completely alien to Javascript.
Dan Ebberts has some great articles and tutorials about those here, and on his site motionscript.com

Anyway,
The problem you’re describing seems like something that could be done with temporalWiggle.
I’m assuming you want the actual positions to remain the same, only the timing of the loop to be altered.

If you apply temporalWiggle to a property like position, the result is based on the keyframed values, but results can go back and forth in time.
Or try precomposing your animation, enable time-remapping on the precomped layer so you can keyframe time.
Set up a loop there (I mean, with keyframes in the time-remapping) and then wiggle or temporalWiggle that time-value.

[Dylan Reeve]

I’ve recently started playing with AE scripting – and being a PHP programmer myself, I can relate… The level and quality of online documentation at php.net has spoiled us for all other languages.

However, there are quite a few good Javascript references online (although being web-focused they sometimes are a little confusing) and there is the “Scripting Guide.pdf” on the AE disc which provides information on the functions, objects and properties unique to After Effects.

I’ve also found the following websites helpful:
https://www.aenhancers.com/
https://www.motionscript.com/

I’d love some other links and resources too though…

[Isaac]

man you guys are always fast. great resources. on the actual scripting for what i was trying to do. can you be a little clear. i used a loopOut on the expression but the expression loops with the same amount of time. my object goes A to B then random wait time, A to B again and then random wait time.

i have so much to learn so little time. but you guys make it fun.

Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.

[Isaac]

https://www.tri-omni.com/action.htm
the top one is a precomp i am making. with the dot in upper left corner then it will go to lower right corner of line. once it randomly goes. i will copy that comp in another comp to create the bottom grid picture. so a dot will come from each line randomly and not all at same time. and i won’t have to create different key frames for each line.

Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.