[Kevin Camp]

try this:

topCircle = thisComp.layer("Top Circle");
sizeArray = [40,70,90,100];
n = index-topCircle.index;
s = sizeArray[Math.min(n,sizeArray.length-1)];
[s,s]

define topCircle the your top circle layer then copy/paste onto the circles bellow the topCircle layer.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

[Daniel Sleeth] “Does that sourceText have a length that AE can use in an expression? i.e. take sourceText’s length and offset thisLayer by that value?”

not exactly… sourceText is just the text that is typed into the layer. it does’t include anything about the size or font, it’s just the text.

however, if you used a fixed width font, and measured the width of a character then you could use that to determine the width of the entire text string.

so, say you used a fixed width font like courier, and you determined the width of a character at the point size your chose was 20px. you could use an expression like this to get the width of the string and then have it crawl and loop:

chrW = 20; // value in pixels
rate = 2; // value in pixels per frame
txtW = chrW * text.sourceText.length / 2;
x = (timeToFrames(time) * rate) % txtW;
value-[x,0]

to make the loop seamless you’ll need to make two instances of the sourceText, so this would go in the sourceText:

txt = text.sourceText;
txt+txt

so that should make a looping crawl for any length of text.. though the original source text would need to be wider than the comp (or the crawl area of the screen).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

the last line of the first expresion should be this:

value-[timeToFrames(time)*offset,0)

got x and y transposed…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

the problem you are running into is that ae sees a text layer as the size of the comp regardless of whether the text all fits within the comp or not…

what you could do is use a simple expression to have the text crawl:

offset = 2;
value-[0,timeToFrames(time)*offset)

and then another for the source text to make it repeat:

txt = text.sourceText;
txt+txt+txt+txt+txt+txt+txt+txt+txt+txt


you can just keep adding ‘+txt’ for as many times as needed to keep text on the screen for the duration of the comp.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i don’t think there’s a way to do that…

what i’d do is pick out a few paths that i wanted to start the animation with and cut/paste them onto new layers and start those animating in first.

i’d do the same for a few paths that i wanted to end the animation with.

then i’d probably separate the rest onto a few different layers and then try to animate those in using stroke ‘all masks’ and maybe ‘stroke sequentially’

with the start/end point animations staggered over several layers, i think you’ll start to get something that will be organic and manageable.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

here’s a tutorial for particular, but it does show show a simple way to make an animated texture for any particle system.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/park_michael/glitter.php

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i’ve done doppler animation using fractal noise, mr mercury, mosaic and colorama…

if you don’t want the movement of the storm system to move much, you can dump mr mercury and use a mask.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

reflective particles… sorry i misread your original post.

i don’t know a way to make the particles truly reflective. you can use a texture layer to texture some particle types (the particle types that have ‘textured’ as a prefix), and you can have that be an animated texture so you could try to fake it.

i’ve done ‘glittery’ particle systems that way, but the particles did reflect an environment or anything like that…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

cc particle world has an option to render the reflection.

i would normally do this on two layers, so duplicate the solid with particle world on it. click the ‘options’ text at the top of the effect settings on the duplicate solid. then select ‘rendering’ and then select ‘reflection on floor’.

you should now see a reflection of the particle system on the floor plane of the effect.

typically, i might reduce the opacity of that solid, add some blur or other adjustment to separate the reflection from the original system.

note, you can also duplicate just the effect (on the same layer) but in the ‘rendering’ settings of the second effect, check the option for ‘composite with original’, but it makes it harder to refine the reflection.

there’s also this technique which should work with any 3d particle system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfuVP7GL6o4

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

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[Kevin Camp]

you would need to use multiple stroke effects on the same layer, each set to use different mask (rather than stroke all masks).

you could then use expressions to link the start and/or end properties of each stroke instance to a single instance:

target = effect(“Stroke”)(“End”);
offset = .2; // value in seconds
target.valueAtTime(time-offset)

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW