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Position Offset issue
Hi everyone,
I am fairly new to expressions, and the specificity of terms in syntax is proving a challenge for me.
In this instance, I have several text layers throughout my comp. The client wants the text to have a subtle movement like camera drift, but have it affect the text only. I figured the best way to do this was via wiggle expressions on the text, with low values. I ended using the Wiggle – Position behavior preset, as it offered me more control than the basic wiggle expression (at least, interface control that compensated for my lack of fluency with the language).
I tied the Wiggle Strength and Wiggle Amount values of each layer of text to a Null Object with slider controls, so that I could make changes globally to all the layers at once as the client and I determined the appropriate speed of the movement. This all worked quite well, except when I had more than one text layer on the screen at a time… in this case, the layers were all moving differently, which was not the look we were after. I figured I could simply apply this behavior to a Null, and make it the parent of all the text layers.. but this did not work… the Null had no wiggle. So, I instead used a solid, and the solid did in fact have a wiggle, but the parenting did not transfer that movement to the children. I tried to get around this by pic-whipping the position value of the text layer to the transform property of the solid’s wiggle behavior, but since that made my layers disappear, as the positions were based of 0,0. I figured I could offset the value for X and Y in the expression so that the layers remain where they are and wiggle in place as per the original goal… that’s where I get stuck.
I have done a search for something similar, and tried to implement the solutions offered, to no avail. Right now, my broken expression is:
n=thisComp.layer(“White Solid 11”).effect(“(Transform)”)(“Position”)
value + [n]I am sure the answer is in there somewhere, but I am at a wall… I figure I could pre comp the text layers and apply the behavior that way, but since some of my text layers are 3D and some are not, this may cause problems… honestly, I tend to try and avoid precomping whenever possible, and I feel confident this can be solved without having to resort to that.
Any help is appreciated!
– Will
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1 Reply
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I think I may have solved it with a simple change…
The expression now is:
n=thisComp.layer(“White Solid 11”).effect(“(Transform)”)(“Position”)
n+valuethis appears to work on the single layer… now to see if I get synchronous wiggle by repeating the technique on other visible layers
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