[Lord Scales]

Dan Ebberts’ expression shall help you!

https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/ik.html

[Lord Scales]

Try this:

layerOp = thisComp.layer (“Layer 1”).opacity //the other layer

linear (layerOp, 0, 100, 100, 0) //as the opacity goes from 0 to 100, the value goes from 100 to 0

[Lord Scales]

Nice expression. It worked fine for me…

[Lord Scales]

[Kevin Olmsted] “Also can anyone recommend a good book on learning expressions? All I’ve got is my AE manual.”

These 2 sites are really good online references for expressions:
http://www.motionscript.com (Dan’s site)
https://jjgifford.com/expressions/

Well, http://www.wikipedia.org is useful especially if you want to look for some mathematical function that is used somewhere without too much explanation.

Don’t try learning all in a single day, be patient and you get there!

[Lord Scales]

[Malcolm Man] “well, you still can’t animate a layers blending mode. Without watching the tutorial, I’d suggest splitting the layer the moment the blades intersect; and then setting the separate layer to Lighten. If you still don’t get the result you’re after, maybe you’ll have to isolate the blades with a mask or a key.”

That’s better!
I never tested changing the mode to Lighten, but I think Add looks nicer. Lighten seems to cut off the brightness of the Lightsabers in the intersection and if you look at Star Wars (better in the SW III), in the scene Anakin fights Count Dooku and he says “I sense great fear in you, Skywalker…” we can see a bright yellow point around the point where the sabers are connected (in that case the point is quite big, and transfer modes’d not achieve the effect). In other scenes we see something similar, so maybe change to Add’d look nicer for this yellow point. Well, I don’t know about what was the topic in which Andrew gave the tip and I don’t know either if this will work nice for the preset, but here is my opinion.

[Lord Scales]

[Dan Ebberts] “I’m not sure if this solves your problem, but you can get the same property on different layers to wiggle in the same way by setting the same seed in both layers prior to wiggle(). Like this:

seedRandom(1);
wiggle(3,30)

Dan”

If I’m not mistaken, I had the same problem and only a

seedRandom(1, true);
wiggle(3,30)

worked.

[Lord Scales]

You are right! It would never decrease!

Anyway, a

minVal = 0.1;
maxVal = 500;
dist = length (thisComp.activeCamera.position, thisComp.layer (“Null 1”).position);
linear (dist, 0, 50000, maxVal, minVal)

will no longer work if the distance is bigger than 50000. I think it is almost impossible to be bigger, but who knows…
Thanks for the explanations. I’ll keep a

dist = length (thisComp.activeCamera.position, thisComp.layer (“Null 1”).position);
value/(dist/850)

🙂

[Lord Scales]

This Andrew Kramer tutorial will certainly help you: https://forums.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/fps/index.htm

[Lord Scales]

Maybe it would be better to create a Checkbox (Effect > Expression Controls > Checkbox Control) and create this expression for the eye’s opacity:

if (thisComp.layer(“Blinking control”).effect(“Checkbox Control”)(“Checkbox”) == 0) 0 else 100

Animate the Checkbox to get the blinking effect.

[Lord Scales]

Weel, this expression will not offer you many control, but try this Dan Ebberts script (I changed it for work in Opacity):

holdTime = .5; //time to hold (seconds)

seed = Math.floor(time/holdTime);
seedRandom(seed,true);
Math.round (random())*100

More info about the script in: https://www.motionscript.com/mastering-expressions/random-1.html