[Pete Burges]

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 = thisComp.layer(“Target”);
follow = target.toComp(target.anchorPoint);
value + (follow.value – follow.valueAtTime(0))

It doesn’t work, and although I am fairly sure there’s something wrong with the way I’ve acquired the offset, I don’t know how to fix it. I would be grateful if anyone could explain why…

[Pete Burges]

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 = thisComp.layer(“Target”);
myProp = target.toComp(target.anchorPoint);
value + (myProp.value – myProp.valueAtTime(0))

But it doesn’t work. It tells me that the property ‘value’ does not exist!? What have I missed…?

[Pete Burges]

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 seems to me there should be some way to do this from an imported sequence directly in AFX.
BTW I tried doing this with Echo, but for a sequence of 200 frames it just really slows down…

[Pete Burges]

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 single value every time it gets tedious. There has to be a better way to view and edit the expressions…

[Pete Burges]

Aha- don’t worry I found it. seedRandom and then a random range did the trick.

[Pete Burges]

I have a related question: I am setting up an effect rig that will need to be copied multiple times across different comps. They all use Particular, which has it’s own random seed functions. Is there a simple expression I could use to alter the random seed value automatically for each comp? I tried this but it said ‘could not turn result into numeric value’.

[Pete Burges]

Cassius- that’s a fair point! Adobe certainly seem to have moved away from ‘optimising your workflow’ towards ‘extorting more of your money’ in recent years. But now they aren’t the only game in town, how much longer can they get away with it?

Oleg- brilliant, thanks so much for that! That script should be native.

[Pete Burges]

Thanks Michael…I don’t have illustrator, but in principle that might work with some other package that supports bezier splines.

[Pete Burges]

I am having the same issue, and the workaround unfortunately doesn’t seem to work for me…

Here’s what happens: To simplify the problem, let’s say my mask path is on a clock, with an open curve described from 12 to 6, with points at all hours in between. To begin with, the first vertex is at 6 and a stroke animation along that path travels anti-clockwise to 12. I want to change it so that it begins at 12 and moves clockwise to 6. What happens for me instead is, if I set the first vertex at 12, it just creates a new segment connecting 12 to 6 and continues animating anti-clockwise. So now it’s still animating the wrong way and I have a line across my clock face that I didn’t want.

If I then re-open the mask to remove the offending segment, it resets my first vertex to 6. I’ve tried resetting the first vertex starting from a closed mask, but I get the same result.

BTW if it helps, I got the mask path by layer tracing, not drawing by hand. Does anyone know a way around this…?

[Pete Burges]

Thank you so much for your detailed response, Oleg…!
I have to admit a lot of that is over my head…I will have to go through it line by line several times until I understand it properly(I’m not really a script guy, I’m an animator who dabbles).
In the end I made a workaround by using the anchor point to track position of the child, and then just taking the rotation and scaling from the parent object. Seems to work OK.