-
motion path (or data) from multiple masks
I am looking to reproduce the popular whiteboard animation style using paths imported from illustrator. I can get a layer with all the mask paths and then use effect->stroke->all paths to animate the drawing of the line (simple). I want to have a hand with an anchor point at the “front” of the drawn portion of the path. Is there any way to pull position data from the path? I tried making the paths a motion path on a null but that only works for one path not the hundreds I have. Any way to get “position” along multiple ordered paths?
The way I found to do it so far is to have the stroke effect “start” and “end” follow each other and then do a motion track on the resulting dot, but this method does not allow for tweaking very easily.
-
2 Replies
-
Since expressions can’t get at path data, you would need for each path to be pasted into the position property of a null. Then you could have an expression sequence through all the nulls based on a slider (or maybe just some time calculation) and use valueAtTime() to get the current position from the current null. A little tricky, but probably do-able, assuming the number of nulls required isn’t a deal breaker.
Dan
-
Dan, thanks for the quick reply. Most of what I know about expressions is from your site! It’s frustrating to know that the “data is out there” as the stroke effect is clearly using the path data but alas! I can see your method working well in a script form where the script sets up the nulls with the position motion paths and then a controller for cycling through them. I’ll look into it some more and post what I come up with in this thread.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up