Hi John, I now had time to run your expression and sadly nothing happens.

I tried to pinpoint the issue and I am pretty sure it is the “return -1” for the “function findLastEntrance(t). Shouldn’t there be some kind of variable instead of -1?

I replaced the -1 with the number of seconds when there is the actual crossing happening, and the rest of…

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Hi John, I certainly appreciate your help and what you are describing is exactly what I am looking for. I will give this a test run first thing tomorrow morning. Hopefully I can learn something as well and put it to good use for future problems ;-).

Cheers, Klaus

As I have stated above, I have a setup of multiple shape layers and one null on a comp. The shapes are static and the null is moving around. The shapes have a glow effect attached to it.

My usual approach is a linear expression: the closer the null gets to a shape, starting at a certain range, the effect opacity rises from 0 to 100 and down again…

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Thank you for the solution. It works but as I found out, as you said, I cannot really work with it.

Also, even my initial expression with a about 20 shapes and one minute comp duration brought the comp to a still stand. I have to think of a different approach.

I have a setup of multiple shape layers and one null on a comp. The shapes are static and the null is moving around. I want to determine the frame for whenever the null moves within a certain range (let’s assume 100 pixel) to each individual shape.

So far, I managed to determine the first frame this happens:

var rangeMin = 100;
var posDistance =…

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That helped me a lot!
Thank you very much.

I figured out the correct expression myself.

First, I set up a null with an expression controls Slider Control “check distance” (just to do some of the calculations).

There, I calculated the distance:

var posA = thisComp.layer(“Shape A”).transform.position;
var posB = thisComp.layer(“Shape B”).transform.position;
var distance = length(posA,…

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I have shapes A and B. A is stationary and B is moving across the screen. I want to calculate the frame when B is closest to A. I guess it’s done with a For Loop and distance but I cannot figure out the expression.

Hi John,

thank you very much for visualising your solution!

Hi Dan,

thanks a lot! This works perfectly!

I have a simple animation, a shape layer is moving from left to right.

Now I want know at which frame the X-value of the reaches 500.

I have set up this expression, but it does not work:

var compLength = thisComp.duration / thisComp.frameDuration;

var posX = thisComp.layer(“shape”).transform.xPosition;

for (i = 0; i <= compLength; i++)…

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I have a text with 3 lines and want to animate in a way that the last line drops in from the top at first when the animation starts and the third line at the end of the animation.

I have adjusted the anchor point to the bottom left of the textbox:

l = thisLayer.sourceRectAtTime();
[l.left, l.top + l.height];

Next, I added a line…

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Thank you Dan!

It worked just perfectly!

Let’s assume I have this text: “THIS IS MY EXAMPLE TEXT.”

I want to count the number of characters until the text reaches the second incident of a space. E.g. up to the second space, there are 6 characters in the text.

I want to use a slider to specify the number of spaces and then use the amount of characters to create a substring.