[Filip Vandueren]

It can’t be done with text-animators, unless you mean using a character animator to add font stroke weight or text skewing to do faux bold / faux italics.

That case is pretty straightforward: dial in the amount of stroke you want added (you may have to also explicitly set Stroke color and stroke opacity 100 as extra properties in the same animator, then use the start and end of the range to limit what characters get Boldened)

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Shane,

The layers are parented to the floor, the Nulls are not.

The values of the layers position are relative to their parent. So even if they share the same numbers, they are at a different location in space.

[Filip Vandueren]

Sure, suppose you want to have a sourceRect for a textlayer, but you want that sourcerect to be tall enough to contain descenders, even if there aren’t any in the current text. (useful if you want to line up multiple

Choose a character for your current font that has a full height both above and below the baseline, for example the pipe symbol “|” is good in many fonts. (Or you can use a character that doesn’t have any ascenders or descenders like “x” , but then add a margin you know will be enough for the font)

Add a “character value” textanimator to your text, with this expression:

"|".codePointAt(0);

You’ll see all the characters change to |. If you would take the top and height of the sourceRect of the layer now, you’ll get the margin of the descenders.

But if you change the expression to:

time < 0 ? "|".codePointAt(0) : 0;

Everything is normal again, the text will only be changed to |||| when the time <0.

So now you can do this:

sr1 = sourceRectAtTime(time);
sr2 = sourceRectAtTime(-1);
l = sr1.left;
w = sr1.width;
t = sr2.top;
h = sr2.height;

The horizontal parameters are based on the actual text, the vertical parameters are based on the text as it exists (hidden) in negative time: every character replaced by “|”

You may want to add an extra margin because stuff like Á is taller than |

I hope that’s clear.

[Filip Vandueren]

in Illustrator you’ll have to make sure that the linedrawing is also traced as a single line drawing, and not the shape that represents a line.

You want the “strokes” setting in Illustrator, but you’ll probably have to do some manual corrections and cleanup to get it right.

With the default image trace settings straight lines for example, become a thin rectangle or thin rounded rectangle. Those have more points, and trim paths in AE will reveal the circumference of that shape, a real path has a start and end point and the thickness and roundness is defined by the stroke, not the shape.

[Filip Vandueren]

Expressions are very suited for this.

What would be the trigger that decides if the layer is visible or not ?

As a example, a random flicker could be something like this:

(expression on the opacity property):

random(1) <0.75 ? 100 : 0 ;

Every frame there’s a 75% chance the opacity is 100 , otherwise it is 0.

[Filip Vandueren]

Make a very small dash (0.01) and a large gap, with Line Cap set to round.

When combined with tapered, it’s not always a perfect circle though.

[Filip Vandueren]

Not with the repeater.

Either with an echo solution, or with tapered dotted strokes.

[Filip Vandueren]

Yes, the only big difference is that exponential scaling where the standard blend interpolation is linear.

[Filip Vandueren]

Let me know if you need something else.

I can think of a few different approaches that can do 0 widths, and linear scales etc. but those wouldn’t use repeaters but echo.

[Filip Vandueren]

Be aware: you cannot start from a 0x0 circle and scale that up to a larger circle.

Also, if the scales differ a lot, the scaling along the blend is always going to be noticeably exponential, not linear. (see screenshot) There’s no way around this if you are using the repeater.

That being said,

the original circle size gets this expression:

thisComp.layer("start").transform.scale.value;

The Repeater’s scale gets this expression:

endScaleH = thisComp.layer("end").transform.scale[0]/thisComp.layer("start").transform.scale[0];
endScaleV = thisComp.layer("end").transform.scale[1]/thisComp.layer("start").transform.scale[1];
numCopies = Math.max(2,content("Repeater 1").copies); // minimum is 2 copies
[Math.pow(endScaleH,1/(numCopies-1)), Math.pow(endScaleV,1/(numCopies-1))]*100;