[Michael Müller]

You can preview with the space bar.
I’m not sure if after effects is the right choice when you come from Sony Vegas. It’s not a video editing software. You should consider using premiere pro.

[Michael Müller]

I don’t quite understand why you pre composed the adjustment layers in the first place. Is there a particular reason why you did not pack all your adjustment effects into one adjustment layer?
Anyway if you wanna do it like that and the layer stops working when you put a slider on it, I’d just create a null and manage the controls there.

Michael

[Michael Müller]

It seems like you have to explain the issue more detailed, as I don’t really understand what you are trying to achieve.
Do you have problems creating the cloud? Should it be somewhat realistic?
What is it you want to loop? The clouds changing shape or form?

Michael

[Michael Müller]

I agree. You want to create a blue solid, and mask it out so it fits your first river. Then keyframe that mask path, create your other shapes and animate accordingly.
Another, more flexible way would be to use the boa plug-in. you could then pull it off with a stroke.

Michael

[Michael Müller]

As far as I know, it’s impossible to create a cube like this in ae without extensions. With cinema 4d lite and element 3d however, this seems like a pretty simple thing to create.
First you create a cube with some fillet in c4d lite. Then you import the cube into element 3d in after effects (you wanna use e3d because it’s 100x faster than the standard renderer for c4d objects in ae)
I’m pretty sure creating a glass material in e3d is fairly easy. Maybe there even is a preset or a very exciting tutorial by Andrew Kramer.
e3d has a bit of a learning curve but its a very powerful tool.

Michael

[Michael Müller]

I’d also like to be able to do that. sure for some things you need a mouse but shortcuts are there for a good reason! They make the time you need for getting things done, wait for it… SHORTER! I mean why are we using tons of shortcuts when we can click on all the frickin buttons in the user interface!? Computers use mice, don’t they?? It would make roto-ing values much much easier if you could just switch between the value edit mode and the frame with page up/down.

This would be a great feature to add. I have not found a shortcut yet.

[Michael Müller]

I just needed a while to wrap my head around it. You helped me a lot with that answer! The problem is now solved. Thank you very much, Dan.

Michael

[Michael Müller]

I don’t know, I just thought that might help but apparently it does not.

Something else I found out is that:
app.project.activeItem.selectedLayers[0].selectedProperties.length
equals 2 when you run it on the offset property or any effect property,
and equals 1 when you run it on a transform property.

Does that help in any way?

Michael

[Michael Müller]

Yes, I am running it from ESTK. I don’t get an error with the first Slider. When I run the script again, actually a second slider with the value of Y appears, not working either and coming with an expression error:
“Undefined value used in expression (could be an our of range array subscript?)

Now the effect does have the following, disabled expression in it: [];

I guess this equals “exprArray” as this is a variable with exactly that in it. “Controllers” is that too.

var controllers = [];
var exprArray = [];

I checked with $.writeIn(value.length) if the properties of the turbulent displace effect show the correct array length and they dont!. In fact, they don’t seem to have any length at all. Neither do they seem to have any value. As I mentioned, if I check for that, the console doesn’t show anything either. Not even an error.

I created a testscript to see if or how I can read the values of the offset property:

alert (app.project.activeItem.selectedLayers[0].selectedProperties[0,1].value);
This gave me the value array of the effect values but refused to give me values of normal transform properties

alert (app.project.activeItem.selectedLayers[0].selectedProperties[0].value);
With this line it’s the exact opposite. Can show transform values. Can’t show effect values.

I thought maybe with something like this except the alert the problem could be fixed. I don’t know how I can change .selectedProperties[0] to .selectedProperties[0,1] though, nor can I read from the code where this Information is coming from. Can you help me out with this one?

if (curLayer.selectedProperties[0,1].isSpatial == true) {
alert(“Case of Point Control”);
}

“Object is invalid” doesn’t appear in any of the bugged actions.

Michael

[Michael Müller]

It seems like it is grabbing the value from the offset property, not the turbulent displace effect (correct me if I’m wrong!), so that is probably not the issue here.
The name is also shown correctly.

I tried to use $.writeIn(value) in both cases:

first time I applied the script to a normal Transform Position Property -> Spit out the values in the consoles
second time I applied the script to the Point control -> Slider appears as in image below – Console doesn’t spit out anything!

Now I know that this somehow has got to do something with the error, but I don’t know what it is or how to approach the problem from now.
Is there anything you can think of using this information?

Thanks a lot!

Michael