Flick book expressions !

Adobe After Effects

Flick book expressions !

Posted by Criis Daw on November 29, 2008 at 11:46 am

I know i should have better things on my mind on a saturday morning but,
well here goes..

I was trying to make a flick book style animation. Now there are quite possibly better approaches to the one i have chosen , but it has thrown me into improving the basic knowledge of expressions i have. Although it wont be used in the final job, it is a good exercise for the sake of learning. See its a fun post and its a saturday (geeeeeek out yeh)

Ok so i want to be able to set up the comp with a top layer (master) that the layers below are conrtrolled by. I also want to be able to simply duplicate the 2nd layer (with the expressions on ) by the number of frames of the animation and for it all to ‘Automatically’ be built.
I am almost there.
The second layer contains the following expressions.

on TIME REMAP : thisComp.layer(thisLayer, -1).timeRemap+.04

make the duplicated layer be one frame (25fps) in advance of the layer above (question why can i not get timeremap to work as frames not seconds ? )

on POSITION :

temp = thisComp.layer(thisLayer,-1).transform.position[2];
[304,425,temp-1]

which tells it to place the duplicated layer one pixel above, in z space, the layer above it in the time line

So like this i can duplicate the second layer and create a stack of ‘papers’ separated by one pixel in z and each one frame on from the next.

Now by using cc page turn on the the layer before duplicating and then using the sequence layers animation assistant and overlapping the layer by one frame i can achieve what i wanted to with a minimum of fuss

BUT

It would be better for me if i could control the page turn after the layers had been duplicated. As it is i have to delete the duplicates redo the page turn settings and duplicate the layers again.

so i linked the properties the second layer to the master using this expression

thisComp.layer(“master”).effect(“CC Page Turn”)(“Fold Direction”)

but then they all do the page turn at the same time as per the keyframes of the master.

so i tried to make them follow page turn master at one frame
after the layer above using the following:

thisComp.layer(thisLayer-1).effect(“CC Page Turn”)(“Fold Position”).valueAtTime(time – .04)

and it doesn’t work .. and i dont know what to try next

the last expression i have successfully used before on values like position and rotation.

Any ideas ?

Any ideas of better ways to spend saturday morning ?

Thanks

Chris

Criis Daw replied 17 years, 5 months ago 25,473 Members · 1 Reply
1 Reply

Criis Daw
November 29, 2008 at 12:18 pm

hi just remembered there is an expressions forum..
i better repost this there

do feel free to answer it here though if you know the answer

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