[Clinton Gorman]

Absolutely the perfect answer Chris. I love this. I’m learning a lot here.

I need only 2 end anchor points for each line, no anchors in between (although my illustration shows one point in between, I deleted that in my project) . The path does look strange when moving the parent around because the handles are fixed after creating nulls from the points.

But the script you suggested solves that! What a great answer. I’m using this script (with a different but similar name to yours):
https://www.nomagnolia.tv/ae-link-path-points-tangents-nulls/

I assume that’s the script you were referring to.

[Clinton Gorman]

[deleted]

[Clinton Gorman]

This is great Walter! Thank you so much for the help.

Is it possible to parent a point (end of one line) to a circle on another line?

The idea is that these are molecules connecting to other molecules. So the animation would be these lines with balls appearing first unconnected, then they would connect to each other, the ends of some lines will connect to the balls of other lines.

[Clinton Gorman]

This is great. It’s the perfect answer to the original question.

I would use this solution if I could but I need to do a few more things that this might not be able to accomplish.

[Clinton Gorman]

This is a creative solution and so simple!

The only issue in my specific situation, I need the balls to be on their own layers because the ends of the lines need to connect to the balls themselves. I’ll have lines of balls connecting to lines of balls.

[Clinton Gorman]

I’ve duplicated the line with balls, created a new name for the line (Line2) and control layer (CONTROL 2). When I add balls, the balls stay on top of eachother. Do I only need to change the line layer name and control layer in the script for the ball? What am I missing?

var thisBall = thisLayer.name.split(” “)[1];

var numberOfBalls = thisComp.layer(“CONTROL 2”).effect(“Number of Balls”)(“Slider”);

var insetAmount = thisComp.layer(“CONTROL 2”).effect(“Line Inset Squeeze Percentage”)(“Slider”)/100;

var lineLayer = thisComp.layer(“Line2”);

var linePath = lineLayer.content(“Shape 1”).content(“Path 1”).path;

lineLayer.toComp(linePath.pointOnPath(linear(thisBall, 1, numberOfBalls, insetAmount, 1 – insetAmount)));

[Clinton Gorman]

Ahhh, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Wow, so nice.

I’m definitely going to have more questions, I’m learning AE on my own here using online tutorials.

Thank you Walter!

[Clinton Gorman]

Cool! But it looks like it lost it’s keyframes and parents. :/

I hope this isn’t going to be too tough with different versions.

Do you have a youtube channel? Maybe you can make a quick tutorial?

[Clinton Gorman]

Hi Walter, thank you for this! I didn’t see a notification from creative cow from some reason even though I’ve enabled notifications.

Anyways, I’m using ae 22.3, I can’t update because of problems I was having with older ae files for clients. Can you save for a previous version (22)?

I appreciate your help!