[Ben Coello]

One way to accomplish this would be to pre-compose the field layer into a Precomp. Use a deform effect on the precomp layer to achieve desired waviness. Within the Precomp you can then animate the lines moving. This should create the effect of lines moving through the wave, deforming as they go to match it’s contours.

As long as the movement is relatively simple, this should work.

[Ben Coello]

Thanks Dave,

I try and stay on top of it, but by the nature of what I do, I’m often duplicating layers then moving them, then tweaking them some more, and then I’ve got 100+ layers and after all that it’s a real pain to go through and order them based on depth.

Anyway, I looked at AE Enhancers and was able to find this script, which I think does the job alright.

https://www.redefinery.com/ae/view.php?item=rd_KindaSorta

[Ben Coello]

Sounds to me that you want a textured polygon instead of a textured sprite. The box for it can be found in the particle properties, particle type.

Sprites are always seen to be facing directly towards the camera, where polygons will allow you to rotate around them in different orientations.

Did that answer your question?

[Ben Coello]

yes Dan, that works perfectly. Thank you

[Ben Coello]

Sorry for the double post here, I realized I shouldn’t have replied to myself…

Hey Dan,

I hope you (or anyone else who might know a thing or two about expressions) can help me one more time here. After fully rigging my model and playing around with it a bit, I discovered one unforeseen problem.

I attempted to link together a series of layers with separate handles. Head, to Neck, to Torso, each parented to the next, and then I parented the handles to the parent of whatever they control (eg The head handle is parented to the neck) What I discovered is that when I rotate the neck layer, the head will rotate some, and then when I rotate the torso, the head and neck both rotate, even though the relationship to their respective handles doesn’t change.

I thought this might be because the handles are taking their positional data from the world of the composition, but I tried just moving the model around, and everything works as it should. So I’m at a loss here. Any help for this expressions klutz is appreciated.

thanks

[Ben Coello]

Hey Dan,

I hope you (or anyone else who might know a thing or two about expressions) can help me one more time here. After fully rigging my model and playing around with it a bit, I discovered one unforeseen problem.

I attempted to link together a series of layers with separate handles. Head, to Neck, to Torso, each parented to the next, and then I parented the handles to the parent of whatever they control (eg The head handle is parented to the neck) What I discovered is that when I rotate the neck layer, the head will rotate some, and then when I rotate the torso, the head and neck both rotate, even though the relationship to their respective handles doesn’t change.

I thought this might be because the handles are taking their positional data from the world of the composition, but I tried just moving the model around, and everything works as it should. So I’m at a loss here. Any help for this expressions klutz is appreciated.

thanks

[Ben Coello]

Dan you are an officer and a gentleman. Thank you.

Looking at the two expressions, I was able to figure out that I could add a number to the end of line four in the first expression, and place the handle at whatever angle to the layer that I chose. So I learned something too.

thanks again.

[Ben Coello]

Thank you Dan, it works like a charm…

…except…

It seems as though the effector wants to be to the right of the layer, and as it just so happens my art is all oriented to the left, so how would I go about modifying the expression so that rotation is at zero degrees when the effector (I was actually thinking that calling it a handle is a nicer term) is to the left or possibly above it’s layer.

This is probably a really basic thing, but as I’m sure is clear I’m totally new to expressions and all this scripting business.

I also have an additional question here (I feel kind of like I should be paying for this) a similar thing to another post of mine, but slightly different. Is it possible to limit the rotation on the effected layer so it won’t rotate to far in either direction, past the point where things look wonky?

Thanks in advance. These forums are awesome.