[Matthias Stoll]

Hi Dan, hi everybody,

I just found out about the pointOnPath expression. It gives you any point on a path based on a percentage value. Of course, this is very powerful because you can change or even animate the motion path while your objects keep aligned to it. (In my opinion pasting path information onto an objects position is not helpful when you need to align many objects or be able to do quick adjustments. And animate the motion path is impossible)

“auto-orient” does work, but as soon there is no animation it snaps to a seemingly random orientation. (before and after the animation)

In this example I use a slider as input to animate the percentage value. But this is not related, whenever there is no movement on the layer, it snaps. I would simply like to copy the first and last “auto-orient” values when there is no animation. Is it possible to replace “auto-orient” with an expression which does the trick?

L=thisComp.layer(“Shape Layer 1”);
p=L.content(“Rectangle 1”).content(“Path 1”).path;
p.pointOnPath(effect(“Slider Control”)(1),time)+L.position

Help would be much appreciated, I have tons of ideas how I could make use of this.