[Dan Ebberts]

Glad to hear it! Doing it this way (where all expressions refer directly to the “leader”) can have a big performance improvement over the method where each expression refers to the previous expression in a cascading way.

[Dan Ebberts]

Ok, sorry, bad syntax on my part. This should give, for a position expression on one of the other books (not the bottom one), a delayed version of the position:

numBooks = thisProperty.propertyGroup(3).numProperties;
bottomPos = thisProperty.propertyGroup(3)(numBooks).transform.position;
dIndex = numBooks - thisProperty.propertyGroup(2).propertyIndex;
bottomPos.valueAtTime(time - dIndex*.01);

[Dan Ebberts]

I’m not sure what you’re doing with that first line.

Edit: Ah, I see, hang on–let me take a look.

[Dan Ebberts]

So Group 1 through Group 8 are each a pile of books? And Group 56 through Group 75 are the books in the Group 8 pile (with Group 75 being the book on the bottom)? If so, then I think what I posted applies to your situation.

[Dan Ebberts]

My advice would be to be very careful. My experience is that ChatGPT writes bad code and when in doubt, it will just make stuff up (hallucinations). It has no way to test its code so be sure to test thoroughly before using. Also, if you’re going to post the code in a forum like this one, be sure to clearly identify that it came from a chatbot so folks can be appropriately cautious.

[Dan Ebberts]

I was hoping for more info about how your book stacks are structured, but I’ll just make some assumptions. Let’s say that Group 75 is the bottom book for one stack and that the books in that stack are all in Group 8. If a Transform/Position expression for one of those books wants to reference the bottom book’s position, it would be like this:

numBooks = thisProperty.propertyGroup(3).numProperties;
bottomPos = thisProperty.propertyGroup(3).property(numBooks).transform.position;

and the difference in indices between the book with the expression and the bottom book would be:

dIndex = numBooks - thisProperty.propertyGroup(2).index

and you could use that to calculate any delay between the animation of the bottom book and the one with the expression. Something like that. The key is to map out (I used a text layer) what the different levels of propertyGroup() are.

[Dan Ebberts]

It’s not clear what you’re trying to link together. Maybe you could describe that a little better? A diagram that shows what needs to be linked to what would be helpful.

[Dan Ebberts]

This works for me:

a=thisComp.layer("controls").effect("show")("Menu"); //value of Show menu
b=thisComp.layer("controls").effect("layout 2")("Menu"); //value of Layout menu
show1=[[50,50],[500,50],[50,500],[500,500]]; //array of possible positions show 1
show2=[[100,100],[500,100],[100,500],[500,100]]; //array of possible positions show 2
showList=[show1, show1, show2]; //dummy "show 1" at [0] for safety
showName=showList[a]; //showName is [a] value of showList array
showName[b-1]

[Dan Ebberts]

I think it would be more like this simplified example:

function getComp(theName){
	for (var i = 1; i <= app.project.numItems; i++){
		if (app.project.item(i) instanceof CompItem && app.project.item(i).name == theName) return app.project.item(i);
	}
	return null;
}
var comp = getComp("comp");
var imageFilePath = '/Users/clara/Movies/AE/Images/my_picture.jpg';
var importOptions = new ImportOptions(File(imageFilePath));
var importResults = app.project.importFile(importOptions);
var layer = comp.layers.add(importResults);

[Dan Ebberts]

I haven’t tested this, but I would think that you’d want use the actual arrays in your showList, not strings representing their names. So like this:

showList=[show0,show1,show2];