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Timeline segmentation
Hi guys,
So I am looking at good techniques for segmenting the timeline. The intention comes from a current project where I have a Colorama (the artist is quite happy with the default 6-part hue cycle) colouring an object and cycling through time. Now, where this gets challenging is that the object fades up, cycles and fades down, with the fading up colour matching the first and the fading down colour matching the last colour in the cycle (effecting doubling that colour). Also the colour offsets by one each cycle.My approach was to cut the timeline up into “segs” as is throughout the code. If the time was inside certain segments, then certain functions would be called. The only problem I’ve had is that this feels a little clunky and the colour cycling doesn’t work properly. It gets to the right area and then kind of sawtooths between one colour and the next one in the sequence (weirdly offset correctly in each repetition of the cycle).
Does anyone know of a more effective way to create “regions” within the timeline or, just as a side note, why my cycling doesn’t work properly?
(This was attached to the “Input Phase” parameter of “Colorama”.
If the attached code makes no sense, I can do an annotated version explaining my madness.
Cheers,
RurycompLen = thisComp.duration;
numCols = 6;
numHoldSegs = 2;
numSubSegs = numCols + numHoldSegs;
numReps = 6;
currentRep = 0;
currentSeg = 0;
numSegs = numSubSegs * numReps;
segLen = compLen/numSegs;
t = time;
segNum = 0;
val = 0;
maxVal = 360;
defVal = 0;
intSeg = 0;for(i = 0; i< numSegs; i++){
minim = i * segLen;
maxim = i * (segLen + 1);
if(t >= minim && t << maxim){ segNum = i; } } for(j = 0; j -
6 Replies
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Thank you for sharing 😉
Can you post a screenshot of how it should look like in the graph editor ?
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This is kinda what I am trying to achieve, the above is only a portion of what I am aiming for. But the principle remains the same throughout. Also After Effects automatically cycles round to 0 degrees itself, so there should be no need to do it manually.
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Also note the above is relatively freehand
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Hi,
you can try this, which seems to reproduce your graphics.
But i’m surprised because your graphics has no color doubling as announced in the first post.
t1 = 0;
t2 = thisComp.duration;
numCycles = 6;
numStepsPerCycle = 8; // 6+2
// ============================if (time<=t1 || t2<=time){0;}else{
t = time-t1;
fullDuration = t2-t1;stepDuration = fullDuration/(numCycles*numStepsPerCycle);
cycleDuration = numStepsPerCycle*stepDuration;
stepIndex = Math.floor(t/stepDuration);
cycleIndex = Math.floor(stepIndex/numStepsPerCycle);
stepIndexInCycle = stepIndex%numStepsPerCycle;phaseShiftPerCycle = 360/numCycles;
shiftStart = cycleIndex*phaseShiftPerCycle;
linear(t%cycleDuration, stepDuration, cycleDuration-stepDuration, shiftStart, shiftStart+360)%360;
};Xavier
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Cheers man, works perfectly!
The colour doubling I may have just explained badly, because you have it in perfectly. When working with maths like this is it generally worth sketching out how you want the motion graph to look or are there other methods that help?
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Sketch is ideal.
I realized some lines in the expression are superfluous and even not used. This one is better:
t1 = 0;
t2 = thisComp.duration;
numCycles = 6;
numStepsPerCycle = 8; // 6+2
// ============================if (time<=t1 || t2<=time){0;}else{
t = time-t1;
fullDuration = t2-t1;stepDuration = fullDuration/(numCycles*numStepsPerCycle);
cycleDuration = numStepsPerCycle*stepDuration;
cycleIndex = Math.floor(t/cycleDuration);phaseShiftPerCycle = 360/numCycles;
shiftStart = cycleIndex*phaseShiftPerCycle;
linear(t%cycleDuration, stepDuration, cycleDuration-stepDuration, shiftStart, shiftStart+360)%360;
};Xavier
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