[Patrick Grossien]

YES! Thanks Dan!

parentComp = thisComp.layer("Name_Parent_Comp").text.sourceText.value;
freq= comp(parentComp).layer("Control_Layer").effect("frequency")("Slider");

[Patrick Grossien]

Dan, this is fabulous. Much better than the numbers effect because of the better font control!

Is there a way to control the start and end date via keyframes instead of the rate?
And also: is there a way to add a time counter to it so I can also end at any given date & time?

Thanks so much!

[Patrick Grossien]

Hi Dan,

I’m facing a similar problem. I’m trying to reference the name of a parent composition via a text layer source text in a pre-comp (in order to grab values of controllers in that parent comp).

Any idea if and how I might get this to work?

parentComp = '"'+thisComp.layer("Name_Parent_Comp").text.sourceText+'"';
freq= comp(parentComp).layer("Glitch Controller").effect("RGB glitch FREQUENCY")("Slider");
amp= comp(parentComp).layer("Glitch Controller").effect("RGB glitch AMPLITUDE")("Slider");


[Patrick Grossien]

Thank you Xavier, and thank you also for the slimmed down version! I’ll keep both of them for future references. This is so much better having the real values and just have them animate over time than to fake something messing around with trial and error until it would have looked somewhat realistic. Guess I’ll need to get back to school 😉

I have found the problem as mentioned above. It does have something to do with the setup – as it seems it comes from an anchor point relation which makes the position values differ from the composition coordinates, and at first I took a read out from the info panel X/Y to set up my points, which messed it all up.

[Patrick Grossien]

OK I found it: I was relying on getting the summits XY positions from INFO window XY values, which were not the same as the true positions of the summits inside the comp

I got this working now, but how can the Info window be wrong? Any clue?

[Patrick Grossien]

PS.

OK direct input of the coordinates works of course.
I just wanted to let you know whats happening where I integrated it into my comp:

In the center of the triangle I get
a: 100, b: 100, and c:-100

and for example at the lower left corner (A) I get
a: 164, b: 65, and c: -129

I’ll continue to search for what happens. But maybe this already triggers for you what could be going wrong here.

[Patrick Grossien]

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for your generous help!

Next beer’s on me! 🙂

[Patrick Grossien]

Wow! Both you guys are amazing. You just made my day.

Now I need to backtrace what you did, trying to understand the math and expressions behind it, but it’s awesome already. I tried both solutions and they both work nicely!

I have the problem that I didn’t get Xaviers solution to work. I tried this one first, because I could easily integrate into my existing comp. Now the percentages are all of. In a clean composition it works like a charm. But I’ll go ahead and try to figure out what’s going on there.

Just to be sure, @Xavier: I could also just add [x,y] values for each one of the ABC variables instead of linking layers to the expression, correct?

[Patrick Grossien]

oh my 🙂

[Patrick Grossien]

Yes, the sliders are just there to store the results so that I can easily use these as text sources to display the percentage in the animation.

I used the 3 slider controls in the dot layer so that the expression can always easily reference to it’s own layer position and that it’s all in one place.