[Mark Gerstein]

Dan,
You’re amazing. Less than 1.5 hours after my post you respond with CODE! Speechless, and seriously indebted…I’m off to the tip jar on your site right now.

2 quick questions:
1. How fine are the increments in Offset? In other words given the .5 put in how many possible positions are there between -.5 and .5?
2. There are nearly 100 layers in my comp; the chances of 2 occupying the same Offset in any given run are high. In that case will the 2 “colliding” layers appear to be in their original stacking order?

Thanks again,
Mark

[Mark Gerstein]

Dan, you’re clearly the answer man (it must be a burden). I’m new to AE and am trying to wrap my head around scripts/expressions. I’ve perused your site and cut/paste countless fragments, but I still can’t figure out a problem similar to the above.

In a nutshell: I have a large collage of 2D stills arranged on a single plane (the stills are partially overlapped and often several deep). I’ve converted them to 3D objects so I can animate a camera. So far so good. Now I’d like to randomly rearrange the apparent stacking order with every frame (or maybe every 2 frames).

I understand only a script (like kinda sorta) can actually reorder layers. At this point the only thing I can think of is to make multiple comps of the animation, use the script to change each one, and THEN laboriously cut together successive frames from each comp in Premiere. Ouch!

What I need is an expression that randomly distributes all the layers in Z space (hopefully small increments that won’t create parallax) for each iteration.

Thank you in advance for any advice.

Mark