Help with Variable Color expression

[Adam Greenberg]

i have a text layer that animates through 4 different colors but its more gradual, so you will need to edit it with some sort of index which Im not fully sure how to do. ill post it here in the next post hopefully it will get you closer to where you need to be

[Adam Greenberg]

4-color-text.aep 131 KB After Effects Project Files - Click to view

• Copy Download Link

[Anthony Kounouklos]

Adam,

Thank you for sending this. I’ll let you know how I make out with it.

[Anthony Kounouklos]

Adam,

I took a look at the project you sent. It’s cool, but not what I need. What I’m trying to figure out is a way to Change the Color of every line of a graphic to be a different color, but have it restricted to the 4 colors that the client requested. Red, Orange, Yellow and white. Now, if you can image there are 20 total lines that come on. 1st is Red, 2nd reddish Orange, 3rd more orangy red, 4th-> Organgy, 5th Orange, then 6th line Orange/Yellow-> as the lines keeping going the color of each successive line is more Yellow until the 10th one is full Yellow. This would continue until we get to White by the 20th line.

I made a 4 color gradient and hand sampled every color for all 20 lines that animate on. I was hoping to automate this with a script because as we all know the client is going to want to use 4 different colors.

Thanks

[Adam Greenberg]

Oh i misunderstood, is there any animation in the color, if not i suspect this is super easy, can you post a jpeg of what you want it to look like, (or if its animated, ) a quicktime ?

[Filip Vandueren]

You would either.use the linear() method on the intermediate lines to calculate intermediate colors.

so line 1’s stroke color is something like;

thisComp.layer("control").effect("color A")("Color")

line 10’s stroke color is:

thisComp.layer("control").effect("color B")("Color")

the 9 lines in between have:

percentage=50;
linear(percentage,0,100,
    thisComp.layer("control").effect("color A")("Color"),
    thisComp.layer("control").effect("color B")("Color")
);

With percentages 10,20,30,40,…90

OR,

you make your artwork in grayscales from dark to light and use CC Toner to map those grayscales to up to 5 tones. For an even distribution of 4 colors I would use colors between 0 and 80% gray and disregard the 5th swatch of Toner Pentone mode

[Dan Ebberts]

The trick is that the expression needs to determine which layer it’s currently working with. This example uses the layer index, but have to define the first and last index in the expression (you might also be able to calculate it from the layer name):

colors = [[1,0,0,1],[1,.5,0,1],[1,1,0,1],[1,1,1,1]];
firstIndex =1;
lastIndex = 20;
numColors = colors.length;
idx = (index - firstIndex)/(lastIndex-firstIndex);
colorIdx = idx*(numColors-1);
if (colorIdx%1 != 0){
  color1 = colors[Math.floor(colorIdx)];
  color2 = colors[Math.floor(colorIdx) + 1];
  linear(colorIdx%1,0,1,color1,color2);
}else{
  colors[colorIdx];
}