[Filip Vandueren]

Is there room in the setup to manipulate/animate the text in negative or fractional time?

I find that if you add an extreme tracking animator (say 1000 or -1000) the ratio of the sourceRect’s (left+width)/width becomes a good approximation of 0, 0.5 an 1 again for the three alignment cases.

[Filip Vandueren]

I think it’s easiest to use an intermediate expression for this:

via scripting add a Point Control effect to the layer, give its point this expression:

fromCompToSurface([thisComp.width/2,thisComp.height/2,0]);

then read the result of that expression and set it as the new anchorpoint value,

then set the position’s value to [comp.width/2, comp.height/2, 0].

You can then also remove the point control effect

[Filip Vandueren]

It’s not clear where you want the script to move the layer to ? Or put differently, where should teh anchorPoint be when the script is finished ? In the center of the Comp ?

[Filip Vandueren]

Nice, can you share the url of the online tool ?

You could also rotate the individual characters with a text-animator.

[Filip Vandueren]

I would try to use Text on a Path with a suitable dingbat font that has footsteps icons.

You can then use textanimators to reveal them along the path.

If you want to place individual layers along a path, you can use the “create Nulls from path” method, and place each layer at a different percentage along the same path, then animate thme 1 by 1, so you see that’s a lot more work than text on path.

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Emma,

you’re starting from the .Aep I shared earlier ?

It uses Json parse and stringify, which can kind of be replaced with eval(),

and it also used styling of the sourceText (not possible in extendscript), to force the highlight marker to use a ceratin font, leading and fontsize, but if those are just set manually, it works equally well.

so this version does I think what you need:

mulitple-word_highlighting-legacy-22.x.aep 169 KB After Effects Project Files - Click to view

• Copy Download Link

[Filip Vandueren]

Over the years, Rubik’s cubes in after effects have bene discussed a few times.

If you want to do it dynamically, I think it’s easiest to do the animation of 1 of the bricklayers rotating, and just when it hits 90°, actually reset it to 0° but switch the colors.

It’s much easier to keep track of just the colors of the faces, than to keep track of all the 3D rotations that are adding up.

I’ll see if I can dig up an example from the past.

[Filip Vandueren]

You can achieve this effect without expressions with the card dance effect,

first create a repeating grid of circles, add a card-dance with the exact number of rows and columns, and use a gradient layer’s intensity to drive the X/Y scale of the ‘cards’

[Filip Vandueren]

I recommend this site and YouTube series:

https://www.animoplex.com/learn/expressions.html#101

animoplex.com

Animoplex - World of Expressions

Master your programming skills with the World of Expressions. Push your creativity to new limits with JavaScript for motion design.

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Joel,

I’m suspecting that it’s not really the anchorPoint that is being animated, but you’re just using the anchorpoint for that toComp() method.

You should also include the time with the toComp method like this:

compMaster = comp("Comp");
mouseLayer = compMaster.layer("Mouse Cursor");
precomp = compMaster.layer("Precomp");
layerStart = precomp.startTime;
anchor = mouseLayer.transform.anchorPoint.valueAtTime(time + layerStart);
mouseLayer.toComp(anchor, time + layerStart);

Caveat that this code supposes that only that startTime has changed, so the speed of the preComp layer (stretch or timeremapping) must be at 100% or the code won’t work.