Trigger Pre-Comped Animation through Condition

[Dan Ebberts]

That changes things quite a bit, but it brings up a couple of questions: What happens when it gets to the end of the animation? What happens if the animation gets re-triggered (b becomes less than a again) while the animation is running?

Dan

[Michael Müller]

End of the animation > I thought that maybe you could reset the time value to zero again, once 20 Iterations of the loop (and 20 frames of the animation) passed.

Re-triggered while the animation is running > in this case, I’m pretty sure that situation will never occur. If it would be just one extra line of code, I’d prefer to not interrupt any current animation. But as I said, it’s probably not necessary.

Is it really complicated? This starts to begin looking like a contract. You have a tip jar, do you?

Thanks,

Michael

[Dan Ebberts]

>Is it really complicated?

Well, it changes the algorithm completely. Probably something more like this (it may not be exactly right, but it should be close):


a = thisComp.layer("AA").transform.position;
b = thisComp.layer("BB").transform.position;
d = 20; // duration of animation in frames
t = framesToTime(d);
lookingForOn = b.valueAtTime(time-t)[0] >= a.valueAtTime(time-t)[0];
if (lookingForOn){
while (d > 0){
d--;
t = framesToTime(d);
if (b.valueAtTime(time-t)[0] < a.valueAtTime(time-t)[0]){
break;
}
}
}else{
while (d > 0){
d--;
t = framesToTime(d);
if (b.valueAtTime(time-t)[0] >= a.valueAtTime(time-t)[0]){
break;
}
}
while (d > 0){
d--;
t = framesToTime(d);
if (b.valueAtTime(time-t)[0] < a.valueAtTime(time-t)[0]){
break;
}
}
}
t


Dan

[Michael Müller]

I’m glad it works now. In my attempt of understanding it, I was able to shorten it quite a bit, while maintaining functionality. This leads me to a question:

I was able to completely get rid of the if statement. All I was left with, was the while statement that was included in both the “then” and the “else” of this if-statement. Did you include it to have the case of re-triggering covered? I couldn’t really wrap my head around it.

The code now looks like this:


a = thisComp.layer("Bubble L").transform.position;
b = thisComp.layer("Trace").transform.position;
d = 20; // duration of animation in frames
t = framesToTime(d);
while (d > 0){
d--;
t = framesToTime(d);
if (b.valueAtTime(time-t)[0] < a.valueAtTime(time-t)[0]){
break;
}
}
t


Thanks,

Michael