Particular – Tie Emitter Position To Stroke

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

I am assuming that you want the emitter to follow the stroked path. If so, then copy the path shape property and paste it into the emitter’s [X,Y} position property.

Ensure that your layers are not scaled before copying (the source path layer) and pasting (the particle layer).

HTH
Roland

broadcastGEMs – AEPro Volume 02 (Professional Adobe After Effects Project Files – Now Available).

Adobe After Effects Training in Asia.

[Antoni Jones]

Thanks Roland for you answer that worked for my path but now I have another problem. I want to do the same thing for a letter, I type out the letter and scale it to the size I want, I then draw a mask around the letter and apply a stroke to this mask. When I now paste in the mask shape to Particulars x and y position values it doesnt seem to work. Can you help?, I am assuming the scaling of the letter is causing a problem?.

-Thanks.

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Like Dave says, you can’t work directly with a text layeer butwhat you can do is to convert the text layer to outlinnes using the Convert to Outlinne feature fonud under the layer menu.

From there, it’s back to the same procedure as copying the mask path andpsating it into the emitter’s [X,Y] property.

HTH
Roland

broadcastGEMs – AEPro Volume 02 (Professional Adobe After Effects Project Files – Now Available).

Adobe After Effects Training in Asia.

[Antoni Jones]

Thanks Dave, I created a solid above my text layer and lowered its opacity to zero so I could see my text layer underneath and use that as a guide when creating my mask. I then applied a stroke to the mask and animated its end property over 5 seconds. I created a solid layer, applied the Particular effect and pasted in the mask shape information into Particulars x and y position property. This worked fine!!, all I had was timing issues which I easily solved by dragging out the keyframes to 5 seconds. I wanted to do it this way over using write-on because I belive it’s more accurate. Anyway, thanks to you both from hours of frustration!!.

[Antoni Jones]

Hi Guys,

Sorry to bother you again but with your help I have got the path and letter working, I’m wondering how would I go about doing a whole word using this technique?. Right now it seems I can only copy one Mask Shape to Particulars x and y position data, since a word is made up of many different masks how would I achieve this?.

-Regards

[Peter Smith]

Antoni,
when masking the whole word as opposed to a single letter, just continue
the mask from letter to letter with no breaks. That will give you just
one mask to copy.Hope this helps.

Peter Smith
Vittorio Video Productions
https://vittoriovideo.com/

[Antoni Jones]

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your answer but the problem is I have a space between the two letters I’m trying to mask, therefore I have to really have a break between the two letters. The only thing I can think of is to create the letters in seperate compositions and two particular effects on each then somehow tie it together into one coherent animation. If you know of a different way I would be glad to hear it.

-Regards

[Peter Smith]

You are right, the best solution is to make separate comps for each letter,then drop into a main comp

[Jamie Niebergall]

Hello. I am also trying to link my Particular 2.0 emitter to a stroke path. I have successfully copied and pasted the keyframes from the mask path to the emitter’s X-Y position property, but the emitter’s path is out of scale compared to the layer with the stroke, so I’m unable to accurately line up the paths.

Could you describe what you mean by “ensure that your layers are not scaled before copying…?” I think this might be my problem, but I’m not sure how to fix it.

Thanks in advance.

[Jamie Niebergall]

Sorry, I resurrected this thread prematurely 🙂

It was indeed a scaling issue, all is working great now after matching the scaling BEFORE copying the keyframe data!

Thanks for the great information!