[Filip Vandueren]

Ziezo:

https://imgur.com/a/y81nhMo

Zoom vs Z-position for enhancing perspective

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Egil,

since this is a “true 3D” extrusion and not just an effect, you will either need to make your camera’s lens/zoom more wideangle and move the camera closer.

And/Or Make the extrusion effect a very high number (thousands)

There are other / fake methods of 2D extruding, but they won’t usually give you the shading on the sides of the extrusion.

[Filip Vandueren]

I thought that was the whole point, being able to keyframe both parameters?

You can’t move the layer and have after effects interpret that as having to add a keyframe to a point control.

If the effect is selected, and show extras is enabled, the point control is visible though and can be set /keyframed from within the comp-viewer too

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Korro, (and Walter)

it’s possible without expressions:

– Draw a vertical Line

– enable the stroke

– center the anchor point (if that feature is not on by default)

– add a repeater, but before the stroke (we don’t want to scale the stroke’s width, only the path)

– settings for the repeater are:

• anchorpoint : the same as your layer’s anchorpoint, but -1 pixel on x.
  you can also use this expression for it if you don’t want to type the number manually:

anchorPoint-[1,0]; 

• Position: [0,0]
• Scale: depends on the power distribution you want.
  for example [200,100] will give horizontally powers of 2 (200%)

Now adjust the number of copies.

Note that if you have too many copies, internally After effects is dealing with a shape that’s millions, trillions,… of pixels wide and stuff will break and give unexpected results.

[Filip Vandueren]

Just add +value to the end of an expression and fix the value to 0,0

So you can tweak it keyframe an extra offset in 2 places. They just get added together.

[Filip Vandueren]

When you type a shift-enter in after effects text layers, for a soft line break, that is the character AE uses.

But regex doesn’t see it as a white space or linebreak character so we need to add it explicitly.

\3 seems to work as shorthand for \u0003 = Unicode character “end of text”

[Filip Vandueren]

Oh yeah, and if you want to make sure the image always fits, also when the mask is wider in aspect ratio than your image, so you’ll want to do it in 2 dimension:

Transform -> scale:

maskSize = thisComp.layer("Shape Layer 1").content("Rectangle 1").content("Rectangle Path 1").size;
if (maskSize[0]/maskSize[1] < source.width/source.height) {
    [100,100]*maskSize[1]/source.height;
} else {
    [100,100]*maskSize[0]/source.width;
}

Effect -> Transform -> Position ->

mask_w = thisComp.layer(index-1).sourceRectAtTime().width;
mask_h = thisComp.layer(index-1).sourceRectAtTime().height;
wiggleRoomX = source.width - mask_w*(100/scale[0]);
wiggleRoomY = source.height - mask_h*(100/scale[1]);
x=clamp(value[0], (source.width-wiggleRoomX)/2, (source.width+wiggleRoomX)/2);
y=clamp(value[1], (source.height-wiggleRoomY)/2, (source.height+wiggleRoomY)/2);
[x,y];

[Filip Vandueren]

I think this’ll work for your transform effect’s position:

mask_w = thisComp.layer(index-1).sourceRectAtTime().width;
wiggleRoom = source.width - mask_w/(scale[0]/100);
x=clamp(value[0], (source.width-wiggleRoom)/2, (source.width+wiggleRoom)/2);
[x,source.height/2];

Assuming you start from the default settings where anchorPoint and position are nice and centered.

[Filip Vandueren]

hi Andy, it’s in the name: sourceRect -> it looks at the the source of the layer, not what it becomes through effects or transformations.

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Paul,

you’ll have to do it with a text-animator, style can only be set for the entire text-layer at a time.

Add a text-animator that for example sets the fill to red.

add an expression selector, change it to “based on words” and give the amount this expression:

words = text.sourceText.value.split(/[\s\3]+/);
i = textIndex-1;
words[i].match(/^@.*/gi) ? value : [0,0,0];