[Ocean Byrne]

What is a “Bacta Tank”?

You could try to get some caustics footage from somewhere, or maybe make some with the grid tool and Turbulent Noise and Displace, and then mask the caustics onto your character. Possibly using the character layer as an Effects>Distort>Displacement Map on the caustics would help distort them about his/her shape…

Maybe some bubbles in front (footage or particle systems) and a subtly moving Turbulent Displace on top of the whole shebang…

[Ocean Byrne]

You’re saying changing the language didn’t help? I guess that doesn’t surprise me.

To get text to reveal from right to left, Open the text layer properties, click Animate>Opacity, and set the newly created Opacity to 0. Then set the Range Selector Start to 100%, End to 0%, and Offset to 0% and keyframe the Offset. Then go later in time and set the Offset to -100%. Once you have the horizontal timing how you like, pre-compose that layer and create duplicates where you mask each line to be by itself on a layer, and then adjust the timing of each line layer to go from top to bottom instead of bottom to top.

Alt+PageDown/Up are very useful hotkeys for adjusting the timing of whatever layers you have selected, and of course Alt+Shift+PageDown/Up will shift the start by 10 frames instead of 1. Alt+Left/Right arrow do the same thing for selected keyframes, which is also very handy…

I’m not saying there isn’t a better way to do what you want (maybe smack your computer with a Quran?) but this will get ‘er done…

[Ocean Byrne]

Hmmm, well you can certainly play with the text animate settings, and then run the offset backwards to reveal from right to left, but you will probably have to break each line into it’s own text layer, otherwise the reverse reveal would go from bottom to top as well as right to left. Or you might be better off doing a reverse reveal all on one text layer to keep consistant timing, and then precomp it and mask each line and adjust their timing to reveal from top to bottom…

Maybe you could change your AE preferences so your default language is Arabic and it would work differently? Don’t know.

[Ocean Byrne]

Are you still mad at me because I like Adjustment Layers Dave? ☺

The problem is that instead of pressing 1 button and waiting 15 seconds for it to re-render my changed section – I now have to press/menu 6ish buttons, and since I like to see my changes in the context of what is happening around it, I have to wait 1.5 mins for it to re-render everything. Multiply that by my incessant tweaking of thing over and over 50 times, and it’s kind of a problem…

But yeah, such is life. And I guess I am fairly used to it. But I did chance to hope, even though it has forsaken these lands…

[Ocean Byrne]

Come to think of it, a better approach might be to put the Turbulent Displace on an adjustment layer, and then draw a feathered mask on it over the hair…

[Ocean Byrne]

You can probably get away with a Turbulent Displace on the hair.

You’ll have to make a separate layer that just has the hair. Draw a mask around the hair, then duplicate the layer and inverse the mask for the body Probably need to shift this mask some so there is overlap on the scalp.

Then apply Distort>Turbulent Displace to the Hair layer, create an evolution keyframe, go later in time and create a new evo keyframe with a higher number, then play with the size and amount to get what you need.

You could combine this with other peoples suggestions if you wanted to get all fancy…

[Ocean Byrne]

As usual Dave, I like the way you’re thinking… the problem is my fade from a “hot” impact leading edge to “cool” text – by the time my 1st bullet is all the way up and cool, the 2nd bullet is already begun hot.

For now I’ve precomped one smooth animation revealing all the text, and then am using masks and duplicates to adjust the timing. Works I guess, but mayhaps someone out there knows a secret way…?

[Ocean Byrne]

You have a script that creates a linked instance duplicate of a layer?

It duplicates and links all aspects of the layer, not just pos/rot/scale, but layer effects, and effect effects like Particular with it’s 80 some parameters and links every one of them to follow their daddy?

Do please tell me you have such a script, and where I can find it…?

Please let it be so!!!

[Ocean Byrne]

I’m afraid I’m going to have to take issue with your normally sage like advice Dave. (I still love you though)

I have several adjustment layers, cause it makes sense. One layer does a turbulent displace on everything below. The next one has an inverted feathered radial mask and blurs out the edges. A duplicate of this layer does so a little less, and lives above the other regular layers that need to stay more crisp and live above the previous edgeblurrerer. Then there is a glow adjustment layer, and a levels adjustment layer. I suppose these two effects could be on the same layer easy enough, but I like having them separate, and labeled in the comp, and when you hit “u” you only see the relevant keyframes instead of a bunch you don’t currently care about…

I can certainly see there is potential to get in to trouble with adjustment layers, but I quite like them and see no reason to use them only when I have to.

The copy/paste approach of putting the same effect on multiple layers has lots of potential issues too. A- I have a lot of layers. B- Some of them use a trackmatte from the layer above which would not play nice with the blurring effect. C- when you go to fine tune your effect, you have to make your adjustments on every layer, or set up pickwhip links, which are cool, and a good way to link stuff between precomps too, but when you’re dealing with multiple layers, some of which have Particular on them with a ton of animated channels, and you got a camera, and nulls helping to move it…, pickwhipping it good doesn’t sound so appealing.

Nowhere near as appealing as being able to say, this one layer here, exclude it from the Adjustment layers A, B, and F…

[Ocean Byrne]

Yeah, I get that it is tricky, and has a variety of potentials to be extra tricky – but Flash does a really good job of it.

99% of the time I am not asking to do anything weird, I just want to go to a frame, and push all actions (keyframes and layer start/ends) back by x frames. Even a dumb script that just did that would be super helpful…

Thanks for the thoughts guys.