New seed for every copy of template

[Matthew Boutros]

This will probably take some creative thinking.

1. I have an AE template that is copied and uniquely renamed for each animation/video.
2. I have a procedural paper texture behind each video (all the effect seeds linked to a controller).
3. Each video needs to have a new paper texture, and I can’t rely on remembering to hand-change the controller each time.
4. It must be a different paper texture as they will be compiled later and need to change paper texture as a transition.
5. How can I make sure it’s a different paper texture for every video/file?

Is there an expression I could link the seed to the filename? That would be the easiest.

Possible solutions that have problems:

• Random seed each time: It could work, but then I have to re-render from scratch and have to re-export the whole thing rather than just part if there’s an error. This may be my best bet, but not sure of the expression needed.
• Date: I could perhaps link it to the date (if that’s even possible) but then I couldn’t export multiple in one day.
• Layer order: I can’t rely on this, as plenty of the files will have the same number of layers.

Thanks so much! Not sure what I’d do without this forum.

[Filip Vandueren]

Once a project is saved it has a thisProject.fullPath

So maybe something like this:

fp = thisProject.fullPath.toString();
hashCode = function(str) {
  var hash = 0, i, chr;
  if (str.length === 0) return hash;
  for (i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
    chr   = str.charCodeAt(i);
    hash  = ((hash << 5) - hash) + chr;
    hash |= 0; // Convert to 32bit integer
  }
  return hash;
};
hashCode(fp)

That would change if you move the project to a different folder too though, so you might want to extract just the filename first ?

Hashing function I found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7616461/generate-a-hash-from-string-in-javascript

[Matthew Boutros]

Thanks heaps Filip, I’ve never used Javascript before but I’ll have to give it a go!