Polar coordinates

[Steve Roberts]

Have you tried turning the image upside down first? Try applying distort>transform first, to rotate it 180 degrees.

[Timothy Chew]

Steve,
Thanks for the reply. Yeah, that is where I am stumped. Rotating the image 180 degrees in PS works but not in AE.

-Tim

[Darby Edelen]

[Timothy Chew] “Thanks for the reply. Yeah, that is where I am stumped. Rotating the image 180 degrees in PS works but not in AE.”

That’s because in PS you rasterize the image as rotated 180° and then apply the Polar Coordinates function. After Effects will apply the Polar Coordinates effect and then apply the Transforms/Rotation. It’s an order of operations problem.

You either need to pre-compose your layer, rotate it 180° in the pre-comp and apply Polar Coordinates to the pre-comp.

Or, as Steve suggested, apply a Distort > Transform effect above the Polar Coordinates effect and set the rotation to 180° in the Transform effect properties.

Either of these will work.

Darby Edelen

[Steve Roberts]

“Above” … “first” … same thing, but redundancy is good.
Timothy! Read my post again! 🙂

Effect>distort>transform is soooo useful. For example, if you want to flop a layer but still be able to scale it up or down normally, use the aforementioned effect to scale x to -100, Y to 100. Then you can scale normally with abandon.