Expressions: Need to be a programmer?

[Alon_a]

To harness “some of the power” of expressions you certainly don’t need to be a programmer, not by a long shot. Simple expressions have almost nothing to do with programming, and even complex ones require only a basic understanding of variables, arrays and loops. You can probably learn all you need to know by studying examples here at the Cow, and Dan Ebberts’ site (www.motionscript.com has returned from the dead!) has great tutorials, examples and discussions of how to approach practical problems.

AA

[Steve Roberts]

At the beginning, you can find some simple expressions just to make a bunch of layers do the same thing, or to make one layer behave like another. To get started, you just need to use the pickwhip to connect one property to another, say, to make one layer follow another. That sort of thing should be in the manual. Once you’re comfortable with that, you can add an operation, say, -15 if you want something to follow something, but be 15 pixels to the left. Then you start to use wiggle expressions, expression controls (in the effects menu) and loop_out expressions, to name a few. Then you can start writing your own, with a little help from Dan’s site (as alon_a mentioned) and JJ Gifford’s site.

https://jjgifford.com/expressions/
https://www.motionscript.com/

… and of course, the COW tutorials.

Expressions can be simple or complex, and no, you don’t need to be a programmer. 🙂