[Peter Vyrostko]

well…good luck

after reading your post again…I realized, that the even distribution will not work that way. I used this approach with particles, so I got confused.

Also..if you want to move the planets in the direction off the centre, you’ll probably need a null object for each planet,and then animate the anchor point of the null object to move the planet off the main centre. .. you probably know this by now.

[Peter Vyrostko]

There probably are different approaches to this..
For facing towards the camera……Transform>Auto – Orient>Orient Towards Camera….should work.
As for the animation..the following depends on how you have parented your objects.
For animating the centre…create a new adjustment layer called controller and apply effect Expression controller, rename it to offset.
This should serve as animated property for moving the planets off the centre.
Than, for offseting the position, aply to all the planets:
x=transform.position[0];
y=transform.position[1];
z=transform.position[2];
o=thisComp.layer(“controller”).effect(“offset”)(“Slider”);
[x,y,z+o]

This way you can animate all the z-offsets together, while you can also animate position of the planets separately.
You can use the same approach for offseting the anchor point, rotation or basically anything..
If you properly link all the properties to the propriate controller on an adjustment layer, you’ll end up with one layer with all and the only controllers you need to animate whole the composition and also the nested ones.
For even distribution I would create two keyframes with values of -1 and 1 and loop them over 2 fromes. Then I would multiply the value with the rotation or z-position.
As for stopping the animation at the certain point…
It depends on what do you actually animate and how…
As for animating the rotation of the planets I would probably use time information and multiply the value (on the adjustment layer) with the controller.
For stopping the animation at this case I would probably use another instance of the time,to deduct the value from the properties you animate over the time expression. To trigger this simple create trigger controller,which you animate from 0 to 1.
Then use this value wherever needed.
At this point this already seems confusing enough, so if you need further help with this solution I can help.
Depending on the number of the subjects I would probably stop all the animations manually.

Peter

x=transform.position[0];
y=transform.position[1];
z=transform.position[2];
o=thisComp.layer("controller").effect("offset")("Slider");
[x,y,z+o]

time*thisComp.layer("controller").effect("rotation multiplier")("Slider")

[Peter Vyrostko]

I actually have solved this.
Using capital letters confuses CS4.
After renaming all the compositions it worked.
I recently upgraded from CS2 to CS4, and I never experienced this.

I kind of expect to experience various problems, since I always use capital letter in names of compositions and layers…

Any fix to this ?
I am using win7

Thanks
Peter

[Peter Vyrostko]

I tried to get an answer to this thing a while ago. I tried to search forums, adobe pages and so on, but with no result.
Yeah…I quite understand why the error happens. But is there a chance to turn off the feature, that informs me about this error all the time it happens?
Like if I render…750 frames.
It errors on 150 frames.
So after render ends I have to press ok on this error message 150 times to get back to work.
Or ctrl+alt+delete to close ae.
It is just driving me crazy.

pet

[Peter Vyrostko]

Anyway, about the smooth motion.
Probably trivial thing, but I haven

[Peter Vyrostko]

Anyway, about the smooth motion.
Probably trivial thing, but I haven