[Daniel Gies]

Hey I was just wondering if anyone would be able to explain the logic behind this. I don’t really understand why it works the way it does.

Body = thisComp.layer(“FlyingBoobies”)
Body.toWorld(Body.effect(“Puppet”).arap.mesh(“Mesh 1”).deform(“ShoulderR”).position);

I guess I am not understanding how Body.toWorld(“”); workds. What does having the layer “Body” before toWorld do. I read the help files on the expresison and I guess I am not understanding how the relationship is influenced by placing the layer object before the “toWorld” funciton.

No rush on thhis, just curious. I would like to understand this so that I dont have to search for it everytime I need to use something similar.

[Daniel Gies]

That is what I figured. No Worries. Thank you for your help!

dan

[Daniel Gies]

Well I cant possibly explain what I was doing unless I sent you the project file. It just doesn’t work right the way I was doing it.

Thanks for all your help.

I have one last question. Is there a way to create an input text field that can pass a value from one comp to another? Basically I want to attach a text box to the characters head where the animator can type in a value that will tell the mouth comp what frame to be on.

It gets complicated because I would want it so that if they typed in 1 on frame whatever and then typed in 25 on frame whatever, it would interpolate from 1 to 25 sequentially.

Is that possible?

[Daniel Gies]

Interesting. Well that is great to know.

I have been playing more with my problem and made some discoveries. I changed all the code as you suggested and removed all the java math operators.

What I had originally was, for example, A head composition made up of 6 frames and 8 layers. Each frame had a different head composition ie.front,3/4,side…each taking up there own layer. The top two layers had two eye compositions. The eye compositions consisted of an eye white, a pupil and an eyelid layer. The pupil was coded to follow a little square in the root composition.

What I was trying to do was control the timing of each composition through code. So if the slider was set to 3/4 view the head comp would be on frame three, while the eye comp would be on frame 6 and the mouth comp would be on frame 25.

It worked when I was on frame 1. I had a perfectly interactive little puppet controlled by sliders and everything. But once a single keyframe was applied, everything stopped working.

What I have found is that my head and eye compositions only work if they have as many frames as the main compositions. It seems that without frames to play in, the code doesn’t work….

I don’t know if this is making any sense.

Anyways, thanks for the help so far. It is too bad the code can’t function independent of time. If you have any thoughts on how this might be possible, or maybe I am missing the boat entirely, that would be great.

Thanks Dan

[Daniel Gies]

Thank you Dan, I am going to start digging into this.

I am pretty new to expressions and started using vectors because someone more skilled than me had used them in a similar piece of code. So I thought they were the better way to do it.

What qualifies something as a vector?

As for the time re-map I wasn’t fully aware of that. Perhaps it will help.

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I figured I owuldnt hear a word for days and days.

dan