[Eric Sanderson]

So i figured out i was making it much more difficult than it was, i just enabled time remapping and did a index-1 valueAtTime using that and got the result i was looking for.

[Eric Sanderson]

ya see thats the thing, there are no animated properties in the comp with the duplicates, the only animated properties are in the slave comp. I really have 3 comps for this object, And the 2nd comp ultimately ends up in my real Master Comp..where ive created this abstract 3d room, where massive, bent and sort of cut up letters (that spell out “design”) are protruding out of the floor, and the “S” is writing up out of the floor and i want the duplicates to write up in succession behind it. so basically heres what i have,

1st comp- “S” keyframed animation using “write-on” revealing the S. 2d layer. And the reason i didnt Dup it in here was becuase there are 2 layers in this comp, the top slowly writing-on, the 2nd quickly and randomly flashing the full letter as the write-on slowly happens. So at the time i thought it would be cleaner to pre-comp that and dup that comp. so i did.

2nd comp- “S” is color treated and duplicated in 3d space along the Z about 25 times. Only animated property is because i pickwhipped the distance for each dup to a single slider on a null so i slowly spread them apart over time…but no animated properties relevant to what im trying to do.

(master)3rd comp- 2nd comp is brought in (along with the rest of the comps containing the letters, continuously rasterized and also made 3d.

So hopefully that clears it up enough to tell me if what i want is even possible or if ill just have to move all the layers by hand to make them grow sequentially.

[Eric Sanderson]

i was thinking something like that but what property do i apply that code to in my master comp? Since its just the time im trying to affect…actually i think i just gave myself an idea, ultimately i just need each layer to happen later without having to just move each layer down in time evenly, so maybe just enabling time remapping and using the time of the layers in the comp for a valueAtTime?

[Eric Sanderson]

seems like you wouldnt need 255 layers and expressions to do this, why cant you just animate a change to color from black to white over 255 frames?

[Eric Sanderson]

and are you saying that code isnt working?..if so try this…

thisComp.layer(index+1).transform.position.

in your ” layer(” “) ” you were telling AE to look for a layer named “layer[index+1]”, instead of telling it to look at the actual index.

[Eric Sanderson]

t = timeToFrames(time)/2

r = random(t,100)

if(t<100){
r
}else{
50}

You can use a conditional statement(if/else)..try this.

[Eric Sanderson]

t = timeToFrames(time)/2

random(t,100)

sorry, i just saw the part that you want it to be visible at 200 frames…so just divide the time by 2

[Eric Sanderson]

t = timeToFrames(time)

random(t,100)

…or actually even better, this one is more literal, tacking the exact number of the frame up to 100 for the random generator.

[Eric Sanderson]

t = Math.exp(time)

random(t,100)

Try something like this..

[Eric Sanderson]

the 2nd attempt was it. So what was the problem?