[Albert Kowalski]

The rotation parenting is not a problem. I just don’t parent rotation of the wave to the ship.
Think about how it works in a real world. When a small ship is swimming it sways in the water. This movement include rotation around its anchor point (which is in the center bottom) and dipping on the Y axis. Of course the ship also move along the X axis. All this happens when we look at the ship from the side.

Look here, at the bottom ship: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wk6sozfoyf1igeb/ship.mp4?dl=0

The wave is not keyframed yet, so you can see how it shifts from the ship’s edge.

[Albert Kowalski]

Hi!

This SWF is just a still vector image, nothig else. I do every transformation in AE. Anchor point of the ship is in the bottom center.

[Albert Kowalski]

Ok, I figured it out. Scaling of nulls was causing the problem. Since I scaled the nulls down to 15% the problem popped up. I went back to 100% and everything works fine.

[Albert Kowalski]

Hi!

Just wanted to quickly update this subject. I have a problem w Dan’s expression for getting the 3D orientation of a child null. At first it worked great. But now I try to execute the same thing with different layers in the same composition and the Y orientation behaves crazy.

Let’s say the child null I follow is called NULLCHILD, his parent is called NULLPARENT, and the layer that follows the child null is called FOLLOWER.

When I change the X or Z orientation of my NULLCHILD, the FOLLOWER follows the null’s orientation normally. But when I change the Y orientation value, it follows in a very strange way, also messing up the X and Z values. So I change the Y orientation in a NULLCHILD like this:

From 0 to 8.7 degrees, the FOLLOWER’s Y goes from 0 to 90. Then when I change further, from 8.7 to 171 – nothing changes, it stays on 90. After that, from 172 to 188, the Y changes to 270, and the X and Z changes to 180, and the Y goes from 77 to 306 and at the end changes to 270, and X and Z change to 0. Now, from 189 to 352, everything stays the same. And from 352 to 360, the Y also goes from 270 to 360. I have absolutely no idea where those values come from…

As I wrote, it is the same composition, the same camera, only in a different position. When investigating it looks like the script is working ok untill I parent the NULLCHILD to the NULLPARENT. After that it goes crazy. Any clues?

[Albert Kowalski]

Thank you! I had different stuff to do, but now I will definately check your code 🙂

[Albert Kowalski]

Hey constanti! Could you upload a project after you made those last changes with separate nulls? I can’t get it to work. Thanks!

[Albert Kowalski]

Wow, sounds great, but honestly I have no idea how to build that 🙂

[Albert Kowalski]

Hmm, maybe I didn’t understand your idea correctly. From what I see, to change the mouth shape I need to go to the TextLayer, double click in the preview window and type, for example, “A”. Then I need to go to the next position, go back to the text layer, delete the previous letter and type a new one. And repeat this action every time I need to change the shape. If this is right I need more time to do that, because it involves using a keyboard everytime I change the shape. When I change the opacity I only move my mouse to change the shape. In the beginning I make toggle hold keyframes in all the layers opacity. Than I just move forward and change the opacity to 100% of one layer (rest stays 0%), then I change different layer opacity to 100% and change the previous one to 0%. So 2 clicks’n’drags to change one shape. In your case I need more moves and also need to use keyboard. Am I right? And ideally I want only 1 click to change the shape.

[Albert Kowalski]

It doesn’t really matter what I will animate. But it is easier to change the opacity twice (first making one layer visible and second make different layer hidden = two steps with two mouse click’n’drags), than go around and change the text layer which is much more clicks to do. So I’m looking for even faster way to animate = one click only. In my ‘opacity’ solution it would be like, if I put one opacity to 100%, the rest automatically goes to 0%.

[Albert Kowalski]

Thanks Steve. Nice one, but I don’t really know how it can speed up my workflow. In your example I would need to keyframe the Source Text which is pretty time consuming. What I need is simple one click solution 🙂