Hi John,

That’s perfect. The only adjustment I needed to make was to increase the division to 200. Perhaps that’s because I’m using 20 repeater instances- in which case I am guessing that number should always be number of instances x10, then…?
Initially it gave me some error about not subtracting from the position matrix, but the error vanished…

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Hello All,

I am animating some text made of shape layers and I am using the repeater trick to create a fake chunky Extrusion effect.
I’ve tried to be a bit (too) clever and rigged up a slider so that I can animate between each repeater’s own anchor point location, and the anchor point of a Null at the center of the comp- the idea being that I can…

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Aha, that explains a lot. Thanks Dan, much appreciated!

Mr Ebberts, you are a legend. That seemed to do the trick- thanks!
I was thinking that after the first few lines the value was changed to the result of r, but your solution suggests that the pre-expression value persists until the end. A lot of my (very amateur) scripting attempts work under this incorrect assumption, so would you mind explaining a…

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Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere, I searched the threads but couldn’t find a good match.

I’ve made a setup to randomise the scale of a layer and also apply an animatable wiggle to it. I’ve linked it to sliders which control frequency, amount, amount multiplier and random seed. It works…but not as intended.
You’ll see in the script…

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Sorry to Necro this thread but I thought it was better than starting another one…

In most cases, pickwhipping will work but sometimes it just won’t- for instance trying to link the source point in Trapcode Shine to a null (they’ve now included a link to null function, I know).
Linking start and end points of advanced lightning, or some gradient…

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Sorry to necro this thread, but I’ve noticed that with Shine (and other effects too) using an expression to have the source point follow another layer doesn’t give the expected result. The source point always seems to be offset from the layer it’s meant to track. Does anyone know why this is and how to correct it…?

Hi Dan, thanks for your reply.
Yeah, whenever this has happened I assumed that it must be a typo on my part (almost all the time, human error is to blame), even though I couldn’t find one . It doesn’t happen often, but often enough that I felt compelled to test it: so, this time I was very careful about typing it in correctly and then I copied what…

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I haven’t found a thread that covers this, so:
Has anyone tried typing in part of an expression which is correct, but still gets flagged as an error?
I have had this happen multiple times: say I am linking a property to a property of a layer in a different comp. So I type in the target layer as comp(“H1”).layer(“Eye CTRL”) and I get an error.…

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I hate to resurrect a dead thread but this was the most relevant…

The expression used here works great as long as the layers you’re positioning between have keyframes on them. But what if they themselves are parented, or driven by expressions? In that case you need a way to track the anchor points….and that’s where I am stumped.
…Or, I was. As…

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Dennis, you might want to download DUIK Bassel, which is a free animation
toolkit for After Effects. It includes just the kind of expression you’re
describing where you can apply spring or elastic motion to your
keyframes (with the touch of a button) and adjust the settling and bouncing time.

Hi Dan

So sorry… I should have tested it further before responding. When I set it up (footage layer with null target), moving the null produced no movement in the layer. However, if I link the first null to another and move that, I get the desired movement. So it does work!
Thank you so much Dan, I cannot overstate how much I appreciate this. It’s…

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Thank you so much for your response, Dan! That’s a much more elegant bit of code than mine.

However, it didn’t give the intended result; it only works if I key the position of the target object, which is basically the same effect as using the myParent* script (which is what I used as the basis for mine). What I am hoping to get is for the child…

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I have been trying to adapt the myParent expression so that it tracks the anchor point of a null rather than a keyed position- that way I can have something follow a layer that is already parented to something else. I have another script for targeting the anchor point, which works well, so I attempted to combine them:

target =…

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I’ve been using the myParent script for years, but I haven’t yet figured out how to adapt it to track an anchor point in comp space rather than the keyed position. I find that tracking an anchor is more flexible because you can track a layer that is parented to something else and doesn’t need keyframes.
So I tried this:

target =…

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I haven’t found this in any searches so apologies if it’s been covered in another thread.

I was trying to come up with a way to replicate the animation of a layer in one comp to a layer in a larger comp- but proportional to the size of each comp. So for example, if Comp 1 (little) is 800×800 and shows a 50×50 red square moving from corner to…

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I could really use a method for this too. But my reason is, I have animations which need to be cropped closely around, say, the movements of a character, so it would be very useful to see every frame at once. They are imported as a PNG sequence anyway, and if I imported each frame separately I could create a new comp where they are stacked, so it…

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And is there any way to expand the expression window to the size of it’s contents, or to open the script in a separate window…? It’s really annoying how it will only display a couple of lines at a time. I know you can move your timeline up so you can pull down on the corner of the window to expand it, but when you have to do this just to edit a…

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