‘Ferris Wheel’ of comps

[Jeremy Allen]

I would think you are gonna need to use some expressions for this.

Maybe this will serve as a good starting point, or give you some other ideas to work off of..

https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/auto-orient-y-only.html

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 18GB RAM, OSX 10.5.8

C4D 11.5
AE CS5 (10.0.2.4)
FCP 7.0.3
QT 7.6.4

[Brian Charles]

There are some scripts here https://aescripts.com/create3dshapes/ that automate the process.

Create a 3D Cylinder and set the Auto Orientation property to Towards Camera. Use the Controller Null to rotate the cylinder 90 degrees in Z then animate the X Rotation. You’ll need to rotate each layer of the cylinder 90 degrees in Z independent of the Controller to re-orient them to the Comp.

[Graeme Moodie]

Thanks to both of you – I will look into the link and also try out your suggestion, Brian

Thanks – its appreciated!

[Kevin Camp]

you could also use an expression for position of the ‘cars’, leaving rotation completely uneffected:

radius = 100;
period = .5; // number of rotations per second
num = 6; // number of layers to rotate
i = index;
x = value[0];
y = value[1] + Math.sin(2*Math.PI*(period*time+i/num)) * radius;
z = value[2] + Math.cos(2*Math.PI*(period*time+i/num)) * radius;
[x,y,z]

the layer will rotate around its position, ie, if its initial position is [-540, 860, 0] it will rotate around that point. set num to the number of ‘cars’ that will rotate. the expression assumes that the the top most layers are the ‘car’ layers, change i to a unique fixed number between 1 and num, ei, if you have 5 ‘cars’ the value for i could be 1, but no other ‘car’ layer could use 1, so the next ‘car’ would be 2, the next 3 and so forth.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW