[John Cuevas]

To bend it and maintain the illusion that’s it’s 3D isn’t going to work well with a .psd object. It’s just going to look like a picture that’s bent. If you wanted, there’s CC Cylinder, or playing with the ray-traced renderer and bending the geometry of layer.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu might be able to give you some tips on building and animating a rig like that with Mettle Freeform. If you have CC(or just Cinema 4D) I’d build and animate the rig in 3D application, and if you need to composite it, finish it in AE.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

There are probably a few ways to do that. One would be to use shapes, add repeaters and animate the copies, and create multiple layers of that to make your triangle shape build. Then use that as a matte for your video.

Here’s a quick example of a couple of layers to create that type of build. 6644_triangles.aep.zip

You might all be able to do it with Plexus, but before you go buy that, you might want to talk to somebody who owns it and find out for sure. I don’t have it, but in some of the videos it looks like they do similar types of things.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

No, lights don’t travel forward. You could copy the lights in the precomp and paste them in the final. Then pickwhip the properties you might adjust from the final to the precomp, so if you adjust the lights they will update in the final.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

It was mostly Dan Ebberts who did, but I’m glad I was able to pass it on.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Very doable, just set the emitter to “Directional” and set up the direction so that it points in the direction you want the particles to travel.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I’m using CS6. I did a test with 2 layers that were different dimensions, but were both were 100% scale. So when I copied the masks it worked fine. Glad you were able to use the solution above to solve the problem.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Create a text layer(shift+cntl+alt+T) and make it right justified. Add the effect Expressions Control > Angle Control to the effect.

Twirl open the text layer and alt click the source text stopwatch to open the expression dialogue and add the following expression(courtesy of Dan Ebberts). I used comma’s instead of spaces, but if you want spaces in the line “outStr += “,” + s.substr(-i*3,3)” replace the comma in quotes with space: numDecimals = 2;
commas = true;
dollarSign = true;
dur = 4;
s = effect("Angle Control")("Angle").value.toFixed(numDecimals);

prefix = "";
if (s[0] == "-"){
prefix = "-";
s = s.substr(1);
}
if(dollarSign) prefix += "$";

if (commas){
decimals = "";
if (numDecimals > 0){
decimals = s.substr(-(numDecimals + 1));
s = s.substr(0,s.length - (numDecimals + 1));
}
outStr = s.substr(-s.length, (s.length-1)%3 +1);
for (i = Math.floor((s.length-1)/3); i > 0; i--){
outStr += "," + s.substr(-i*3,3);
}
prefix + outStr + decimals;
}else{
prefix + s;
}

I made an example project if anything is unclear: 6633_moneycounter.aep.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

At some point did you change the scale of the layer with the original mask?

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Create a new solid that is big enough and copy the mask from your first layer to the new solid.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

In the Advanced tab of the Composition Settings dialog box (Composition > Composition Settings), choose Preserve Resolution When Nested or Preserve Frame Rate When Nested Or In Render Queue for a composition to retain its own resolution or frame rate, and not inherit those settings from the containing composition. For example, if you deliberately used a low frame rate in a composition to create a jerky, hand-animated result, you should preserve the frame rate for that composition when it is nested. Similarly, the results of rotoscoping may look wrong when converted to a different frame rate or resolution. Use this setting instead of the Posterize Time effect, which is less efficient.

After Effects /
Precomposing, nesting, and pre-rendering

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.