[Mitch Mann]

I don’t know if this helps, but its a point of interest on this topic:

If you time remap a precomp, and then try to get a slider value from within that precomp, it gets the value from the main comp’s current time, NOT the precomp’s time remapped time. So it seems that time remapping is not respected when getting values between comps. This has been very bothersome to me.

[Mitch Mann]

Hmm, thats a curious idea. Dan would probably know if there’s a way to do that. I wonder if the pause would tie up your cursor not letting you do anything else in AE. And the other question is whether the pause would be processor intensive. Its interesting academically, but it sounds like its not crucial to what you’re doing.

[Mitch Mann]

Here’s what I do: Make a “Get” button in your interface. When clicked, it looks for the value in the comp and updates your interface with what it found.

[Mitch Mann]

Here’s how I would do it: Rather than trying to get the math elegant and perfect, just add a slider to each one. You can then add the slider’s value to the Y value of the number position, and adjust it for each bar’s number. This could also be convenient if you have a background image and you want to nudge one of the numbers up or down to not interfere with the background.

[Mitch Mann]

Just keyframe it along your path, then add this expression to the position:

wiggle(10,100)

And is should wiggle along the path of the keyframes.

[Mitch Mann]

Math.round(thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).transform.rotation)

[Mitch Mann]

I was thinking of some kind of wiggle expression for this. I tried your solution, Dan, and its great!

[Mitch Mann]

If you used Newton I guess you’d link the scale to other attributes with an expression, rather than hoping Newton would do it all automatically. Yeah, my post was to help you to think through your creation of an expression that might work for you, I haven’t done all the work for you there.

[Mitch Mann]

You could probably do something like this with Newton 2.

https://motionboutique.com/newton/

Keyframing sounds like a good solution, the math sounds tricky. For starters, I guess the distance between any two objects would need to be something like:

Distance between Objects A & B = ( (Object A’s width / 2) * (Object A’s scale) ) + ( (Object B’s width / 2) * (Object B’s scale) )

[Mitch Mann]

I would do it without expressions. Instead of a mask, draw the shape in a preComp, bring that preComp into your main comp, put an animated turbulent displace effect on it, and use it as a track matte over your cloud image.

Actually, you could probably just throw the turbulent displace on your cloud image, seeing as how masks happen before effects do. In this case, any texture on the cloud would also wiggle and distort. In the previous example, just the outline of the cloud would wiggle.