[Harry Hoag]

Yes! I kind of gave up on this as it’s quite hard to explain and I knew there was no answer really, but that is exactly it.

There is no way to manually create an INCOMING hold keyframe. After effects will make one if you’re making a keyframe after a hold frame, but there’s no way to MAKE one. For character animation it would be really handy sometimes. There may be a feature I’m not aware of but seems like something adobe would have to add.

[Harry Hoag]

Hi Dave, thanks for the reply although I think you may have missed a key (pun intended) part of my problem. When you hit toggle hold it only holds the outgoing animation, is there a way to convert a keyframe to a hold in both directions?

[Harry Hoag]

might be the effect that’s causing that. Try putting the mask on a solid layer above the layer with the effect on it. Then use the solid with the mask as an alpha track matte.

[Harry Hoag]

Hi Petar, not sure about a tutorial, I’m sure it’s out there if you just googled generate thinking particles with xparticles.

Basically go to the emission tab on your xparticles emitter, near the bottom click generate thinking particles. They should change from green dots to white ticks. On the main menu bar open simulate > thinking particles > thinking particle settings. Drag the TP group ‘All’ onto the ‘Add to TP Group’ text box in the xparticles emission tab. Then make a cloner and put it on object mode, the drag the TP group ‘All’ into the ‘object’ text box in the cloner. That’ll do it!

hope that helps

[Harry Hoag]

Hey Miguel and Dan, thanks for responding. I have it working now with some more help from a dev friend of mine. I’m trying to make a new tool to expand the capability of shape layers. We’re going to release it as a script hopefully soon.

The main problem was a few parts of our calculations which were not correct. It was returning the wrong number of array data points which was why I was getting an out of range of array error. But you guys were right about the for loops and compatibility working.

It’s so hard making stuff like this without a console, no way to debug. I hear there’s a limited way to debug with a text layer? Can you guys recommend the best way to debug?

[Harry Hoag]

hmm, it’s been a while since I’ve used the text animators, always find it fiddly. Not sure how to move all the characters one by one along the line probably possible but…

… it might actually be easier to just use that same expression on the text layer too. Then you could actually just parent the text and the hammer shadow to a null with the inverse of the same expression, (i.e. just swap the outputLow and outputHigh) eliminating the need to precomp anything! Easy peasy! 😉

[Harry Hoag]

One way I’ve thought of that might make things a bit easier is to set up another text animator that pushes all the characters along the line to the left as they appear. So the one appearing is always in the same place. Use a pickwhip expression to link the position movement to the typewriter animation. That way you don’t have to move the hammer shadow. You’ll still have to change the size of the hammer manually (i’d probably do myself a favour and keep it the same size!)

Then (the trickier bit) you can precomp that animation, then use a expression linking the keyframed percentage of the typewriter animation to the position of the precomp to keep the text static and everything else moving along the line. A range mapped expression would work, something like this:


input = comp("precomp_name").layer("youranimating_text").text.animator("Animator 1").selector("Range Selector 1").start;

inputLow = 0;

inputHigh = 100;

outputLow = -1000; //start position of precomp

outputHigh = 1000; //end position of precomp

linear(input,inputLow,inputHigh,outputLow,outputHigh)


I hope that helps. Might be trickier if you have multiple lines of text! But you can make this same method more complicated by adding another text animator that keeps the new lines in the same place, and a adding a Y axis to the precomp expression.

All about not moving the hammer as I’m pretty sure you can’t access absolute character positions in after effects… You can, however, do this in cinema 4d!

H.

[Harry Hoag]

if you’re still working on this…. you can generate thinking particles from xparticles, then use a cloner object on the thinking particles to generate the bats. Then all you would have to do is use a random effector on time offset to randomise the flapping of the bat clones. If that makes sense?

[Harry Hoag]

Hi Guys,

I havent used this yet but looks like someone is charging to do the same thing:
https://aescripts.com/l3tt3rm4pp3r/

Not sure why you would buy that when you can use this amazing expression!

Has anyone checked to see if they’re ripping off Dan’s script?

[Harry Hoag]

Ok guys, to help things along a bit, i’ve attached a comp that tries to explain what I’m after.

So if you look at the comp, I want to distort the text in the precomp to match exactly the text in the main comp. To do this with normal corner pin you’d have to fiddle backwards and forwards with the pins until the text matches.

In my comp I’ve set up four nulls. If the corner pins were properly linked and anchored to those nulls then it would take no time to line up the text. Currently with the expressions, I’ve crudely parented the pins to the nulls by hard coding their start positions. But this is not better than the original. I need help linking all the points to each null so that the image is properly anchored to the nulls. I hope this makes sense.

If we managed this, with adjustable start positions of the nulls, it would vastly improve the standard cornerpin! What do you think?

I’ve made it cs5.5 for max compatibility.

7310_cornerpinwithnulls01cs5.5.aep.zip