[Christoph Müller]

lol. I made an AE file to show you what I meant and you know what, you are right (of course you are). Now everything is working as it should… Embarrassing. Sorry to have you bothered with a problem that actually didn’t exist and thanks for your time.

[Christoph Müller]

The problem I have is that the frisbee does not stay at the positioned keyframe (B) but moves to another place in the comp when the parenting starts. And at the end of the parenting it goes back again to the original position instead of staying where it went with the parenting.

[Christoph Müller]

The characters hand and the frisbee are two seperate layers. Each one would be individually animated with keyframes. The frisbee comes in from point A to point B which is very close to the grabbing hand. At this point it follows the hand movement and its keyframes (position, rotation) till it is thrown away again. and goes from C to D.

Does that make sense?

[Christoph Müller]

Thanks for your reply Dan. It definitely brings me closer but it’s not what I am looking for. What I actually want to achieve is the following:

A character plays frisbee. The frisbee flies towards the character and at a given time he grabs it, moves it around a bit and fires it again into some other direction. So, the frisbee should be able to move on its own but when the character grabs it, it should move along with the hand. Then when he fires the frisbee again, it should be able to move on its own again. Is this possible?

[Christoph Müller]

I know that this is an old thread, still I am trying to get the parenting-expression to work and can’t figure out what I am doing wrong. The ‘child-layer’ follows the ‘Master-layer’ but before, it changes its position and at the end it goes back again to where it was…

This is what I use on the ‘child-layer’:

timeToStart = 2.5;
timeToEnd = 6 ;

if (time > timeToStart && time < timeToEnd)
{
thisComp.layer(“MASTER”).toComp([0,0,0])
}else{
value
}

It seems that the change in position is related to the ‘toComp([0,0,0])’-part. How can I make it work to stay at its place?

[Christoph Müller]

ok. Thanks for clarifying, but how would I do that?

L = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”);
L.toWorld(L.anchorPoint)

+

temp = thisComp.layer(“Head”).transform.yRotation;
[-temp*3, 0]

How would I join them?

[Christoph Müller]

mmmmm… I just am thinking what kind of drives would actually be worth buying. The fastest bus would be an internal drive, but I can’t add any in my iMac. So it only would be an external SSD, but it must be the first in a daisy chain, right? Does this even make any sense? I mean, if other data goes through the SSD does this affect the speed? I just realize that I don’t have any clue how to buy something that really would benefit my workflow. Any suggestions?

[Christoph Müller]

Nevermind. It seems to work with:

temp = thisComp.layer("Head").transform.yRotation;
[-temp*3, 0]

This moves the layer 3 times the value of the yRotation. Works perfectly. Is this the best method to achieve this?

[Christoph Müller]

I was thinking exactly about that and thought to go with a 250GB since my 100GB dedicated space on my computer is full very fast. Is it worth it? I mean, does an external SSD make AE much faster since disc cache and footage/comp files are separated?

[Christoph Müller]

Thanks Walter for your response, but I have no clue what that is and what it could have to do with what I want to do. Sorry, I am new to this.

At the end I think when I parent an expression to another layer, then I am still parenting (?)… probably yes. So actually I don’t have to make it even more complicated with world coordinates. Hopefully not.

Isn’t there something like:

if comp(“Puppet”).layer(“Head_CTRL”).effect(“yRotation”)10
then comp(“Puppet”).layer(“Face_CTRL”).effect(“yPosition”)30

obviously it must be more complex than that so it works both ways, left and right + for the smaller values it would have to calculate somehow a percentage… but as said, no idea how to achieve that. 🙁