[Filip Vandueren]

Try this, with a slider “Cycles” instead of “Speed” that you set to how many cycles you want to occur in the comp’s duration, then:

C = effect("Cycles")("Slider");
S = (Math.PI*2*C)/thisComp.duration;
A = effect("Amp")("Slider");
F = effect("Frequency")("Slider");
R = effect("Resolution")("Slider");
W = effect("Width")("Slider");
P = [];
for (i=0; i<R; i++) {
	P.push([W/R*i, Math.cos(time*S+i / (R/F))*A]);
	}
createPath(P, [], [], false)

[Filip Vandueren]

Remember that the track and the resulting cornerpin are not the same thing. You can track a portion of a surface while the actual corners of the output track are elsewhere.

So I would try to manipulate the corners inside of mocha AE

[Filip Vandueren]

I’m not sure what you mean by line of options.

Do you mean the In/Out/Duration/Stretch Columns ?

those can be reactivated by using either the 3rd icon in the lower left of the timeline.

Or you can manually choose whatever extra columns you want or don’t want by either right-clicking on any of the column headers and choosing from the pop-up menu, or by clicking on the sandwich icon (☰) next to the comp’s name in the tab of the timeline panel, there you’ll find some other timeline view options that are only accesible via that often overlooked icon.

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Albert, unfortunately expressions can only access the path as it is stored in the original property or keyframe, not how it finally looks after trnsformations such as wiggle paths or zig zag.

Maybe you can achieve your path design in illustrator, and import it ?

[Filip Vandueren]

You could precomp the rotating shape, or since you mention it is a shape, you could use shape repeaters instead of repetile which is a pixel effect.

[Filip Vandueren]

I would suggest you do an export from After Effects’ render queue, using the prores codec, whan that’s finished convert the prores to your final delivery format.

[Filip Vandueren]

It is a limitation of the wave warp, the internal formula that does the distortion doesn’t have enough precision at such extreme settings, it even seems to max out at Wave width of 128, more than that and it starts doubling pixels. So at 6000% you’re seeing columns of nearly 48 pixels.

Maybe a good alternative can be Mesh Warp with 1 row and 2 columns, you can manually set the bezier handles of the distortion in the middle.

Or a displacement map, but you’d have to create a custom grayscale map to do the distortion you want. Something like these:

https://we.tl/t-d5XjlXC85I

[Filip Vandueren]

Links have a funny way of doing that after 15 years 🙂

The basics could be something like this:

originalTime = thisComp.layer("time").text.sourceText.value; // get a time as a string
timeComponents = originalTime.split(":"); // convert it to an array [hourString, minuteString]
d = new Date(0);

d.setHours(parseInt(timeComponents[0]));
d.setMinutes(parseInt(timeComponents[1]));
timeOffset = 1; // 1 hour later
d2 = new Date(d.getTime()+timeOffset*3600000);
offsetTime = d2.toLocaleTimeString([], {hour: '2-digit', minute: '2-digit'});

[Filip Vandueren]

OK,

I think I noticed a glitch in the interface that briefly displayed a -1 in the value field.

That got me thinking: probably After Effects is doing an error check before it tries to render the image or something. Or it is trying to execute/check the code at some other edge cases that make it fail the code, but wouldn’t fail when we need it at display/rendertime

Indeed, explicitly setting total=3 works, setting a=b=c=[1,1,1,1]; works too, so at the time it is checking for the errors, it is not correctly sampling the images.

using x=Math.max(0,total-1); works

(if you change the first value of the array back to an integer)

So all this means total is equal to zero while error-checking, but not while rendering the frame.

Which is indeed strange that it doens’t occur on text-layers.

[Filip Vandueren]

…Except it doesn’t…

Sorry, I was only checking in the Text-layer.