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Get position of shape layers anchor point
Hi there
I have an animated shape layer (a line consisting of three anchor points which depicts an arm). I now would like to attach another layer (a hand) to the end of the arm (the animated shape layer).
Best solution in my eyes would be to get the last anchor points position as a reference for the hand in a script. Is there a way to do this, and if yes, how?Any scripts dealing with anchor points of shape layers (and I don’t mean the anchor point where the layer rotates around but rather one of the points I drew to get the line (=arm)).
Or can I anyhow link the arm and the hand otherwise without having to animate the hand separately?
Thanks for any hints
Cheers
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4 Replies
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I can’t tell if you’re talking about scripting or expressions. Scripting does have access to path nodes, but expressions don’t. If you are talking about expressions, it might be easiest to just parent a null to the shape layer at the point you want to reference and then use toWorld() or toComp() to get those coordinates.
Dan
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Oh. I did not know the difference. Thanks for that piece of information :).
I mainly talk about expressions then, because I have never done anything with scripting and I would not even know how to tackle that task.
Anyway, I don’t really understand your proposed solution.
The Null Object would not follow the one path node, I’m interested in, right?
So how would I get the position of one path node? (the toWorld and toComp would just translate a position from layer space to comp space, correct?)I understand that I can get the position at time X, if I manually place a nullobject above it. But what I really want is to have a layer follow that path node which is animated. So basically I could get it’s initial position from the null object, but after a few frames, my path node has wandered and my null object would remain at it’s place…
Or do I misunderstand you?Anyway. Your help is incredibly much appreciated, also in other posts where I found a lot of answers to my questions already. Thanks you.
J
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There really isn’t any way for an expression to link to a path node. There are scripts out there that will analyze your animation and move a null around to follow a particular node, but if you change the animation you have to re-run the script.
Dan
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Ok thank you. I think I’ll do it manually then :).
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