[Ocean Byrne]

Hmm, I like the way you are thinking, but I dont think that will work for me.

I want a bunch of streaks connecting all my pixels to the same center point. Like in sci-fi movies when the laser scans the room and a beam shoots out of the scanner to all the points it hits.

[Ocean Byrne]

Grow Bounds was the wrong phrasing. What I want to do is expand out around the alpha of my layer. Essentially I want to outline my alpha with 1 pixel, then 2, and so on.

I can get a workable effect with a Layer Style/Glow, but then you have to precompose it for my purposes which is mildly as hassle in terms of ease of editabilty. Also Erodilation could push out the colors as well as the alpha, which was handy.

Any tips on a new way to do this?

–

If it was up to me, I would let AE use any old plugin, but maybe tell you “This plugin is not 64 bit, and may slow down performance.”

[Ocean Byrne]

Can you guess where my mask is?

Okay, it is admittedly subtly, but if you look you can clearly see an arch around the top right of the screen, where the exact same mask on two different layers meets.

I have actually managed to fix the issue in this case, by making my masks straight vertical and horizontal, but I could imagine scenarios where that would not be possible…

[Ocean Byrne]

If anyone is interested, I got it working with the help of sleeping on it, to realize I needed a variable to cumulatively track how much a point has moved based on the FlowZ rate, and then the help of Dan ‘The Man’ Ebberts to figure out how to code said realization.

The following is the expression I put on the Offset turbulance, so it tracks the FlowZ dunes

Adder = comp("Shashkin").layer("Desert").effect("Form")("Flow Z");
f = timeToFrames(time);
Cumulo = 0;
for (i = 0; i <= f; i++){
t = framesToTime(i);
Cumulo += (Adder.valueAtTime(t) / 30);
}
[750, Cumulo]

[Ocean Byrne]

Thanks a bunch for your help Dan,

Took some tweeking, but I got it working:

Adder = comp("Shashkin").layer("Desert").effect("Form")("Flow Z");
f = timeToFrames(time);
Cumulo = 0;
for (i = 0; i <= f; i++){
t = framesToTime(i);
Cumulo += (Adder.valueAtTime(t) / 30);
}
[750, Cumulo]

[Ocean Byrne]

So I dont think basing it on time will work for me, cause that doesnt account for the the various changes that Adder made over time.

So how would I go about creating this loop that looks at the history of Adder and calculates Cumulo on each frame?

Thanks for your help.

[Ocean Byrne]

Thanks. I was kind of thinking along those lines, but for one thing, would AE still smoothly interpolate if I strretched beyond the length of precomp? If not I suppose I could make the precomp excessively long, but I’m curious how that works anyhow?

The other thing though, is I have other layers that I want to be more specific and they are under some looping elements, and over others. I would prefer to keep everything where it is.

Can I apply the linear() to a range of frames on each channel I want controlled by the angle slider?

Appreciate the thoughts.

[Ocean Byrne]

Huh, well that does seem to be the problem. Thank you sir.

I zeroed out all the X’s and Y’s of the picture layers and the camera and it seems to work.

I dont really understand though. Originally X was 1824 and Y was 1368 (center of the images)for all the layers and the camera, and the opacity expression worked fine. Once I added the pos expression though it went south.

Functioning now though, weather I understand or not. Thanks.