[Eric Chard]

Thanks Todd!

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“Putting the HARM in ‘harmonica’ since 2005.”
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[Eric Chard]

BTW, Dan Ebberts himself (along with others) supplied me with a PERFECT implementation of my request, so if you want an expression that will loop before AND after a keyframe set, jump over to the Expressions Forum and snag it.

(Dan’s worked better in that it could be applied to a channel with no keyframes, AND did not create a spurious keyframe when applied as an Animation Preset.)

Many thanks to the contributors in the Expressions Forum.

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[Eric Chard]

I was trying to avoid moving the anchor point.

It’s certainly a solvable problem, I was just hoping it was solvable in the way I wanted it to be solvable. 😉

On a related topic: Sometimes programmers bone their users by introducing restrictions where they needn’t exist– limiting scaling for instance to bottom out at zero. For instance, in Lightwave it might have made sense to limit a light’s intensity to bottom out at zero, since that makes RW sense, but mathematically there’s no reason to. The LW programmers chose not to limit the animators, allowing them to use ‘darklights’, lights that ‘shine darkness’, which turn out to be quite useful, although of course impossible in the RW.

Similarly, I wish the AE devs would not limit parameters to ‘values that make sense’, because nonsensical values can be quite convenient for the animator at times, and being handcuffed by an adherence to inappropriate physical models is short-sighted.

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[Eric Chard]

In that case, I suggest you examine the Silhouette modes and pre-comping.

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[Eric Chard]

Nothing’s blocking the photo.

There’s a number of ways to approach this: a mask on the photo is probably the fastest.

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“Putting the HARM in ‘harmonica’ since 2005.”
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[Eric Chard]

That’s a beauty Dan, thank you so much!

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[Eric Chard]

Hmmm. Issues that have nothing to do with the Expression’s actual functionality, which is perfect (thanks again):

When I try to save this as a preset, it (of course) saves the keyframes. When I delete the keyframes to try and save without, I get an error from the expression (which needs keyframes), but it DOES save the Expression, BUT when you load the preset it adds a keyframe at the current time.

I think these are just generic AE preset issues– what I’d like is for the Preset system to ONLY load the expression into the selected channel, as if I’d cut/pasted it there, and to work w/the existing keyframes. Why AE is adding a keyframe, I don’t know.

I’d happily take the overhead of making sure the channel had keyframes (as the Expression requires keyframes), if it would just/only/simply/solely load the Expression.

Am I creating the preset incorrectly?

Thanks!

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“Putting the HARM in ‘harmonica’ since 2005.”
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[Eric Chard]

Brilliant! Works a treat! Thanks mate!

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[Eric Chard]

AFAIK, it cannot be done dynamically without expressions.

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“Putting the HARM in ‘harmonica’ since 2005.”
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[Eric Chard]

Appreciated none the less! I suppose this is rather beyond the ‘basics’ of this forum anyhoo…..

Thanks!

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“Putting the HARM in ‘harmonica’ since 2005.”
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