[Ryan Lewis]

Oh, good point. Thanks! I’ve made that mistake before.

Basically, that “publish” action you described, I’d be implementing in the precomp and then perhaps sending a param from the main comp (or pulling one in) that decides which of the 15 rasters to display.

[Ryan Lewis]

Yeah, the trick is to render the components dynamically, so when fed with different input footage, the behaviour is the same…

My other thought is to make a precomposition with all of the source raster images as layers (about 15) and then I’d only have to create 144 instances of the precomposition (max number of coexisting instances). Much more manageable.

The precomposition could then have a controller that tells which of the 15 images to display. The main composition would determine how each of those performed.

Now my only question is how to directly access a slider/controller/property in a lower precomp…

I found this thread…
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/227/23959#23959

And assume that I could do something similar…

C = comp("maincomp");
L = C.layer(thisComp.name);

[Ryan Lewis]

Just did the math on (max potential # instances) x (# of source images) and that would leave me with about 2160 layers to turn on and off! Yikes! I suppose if I stick to a strict indexing convention, it is totally feasible but I worry about AE performance in managing that many layers at once…

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/890911

[Ryan Lewis]

Going off of what Dan said, if you could get the points into CSV or some other regularly-parseable format, just regex them (or simple find/replace commas with bracket pairs) into the aforementioned data format.

[Ryan Lewis]

Excellent, Dan!
Indexing looks like it’ll help! I was thinking something similar (to expressing the opacity), but my only hang-up would be how to show multiple instances of each layer without statically creating multiple copies of each. This is because ahead of time, I don’t necessarily know how many instances I’ll need of each image. (Like 8 red balloons vs. 3 blue ballons.)

Worst case scenario, I could create the maximum # of copies I’ll need for each and then just map the index to a layout representation so I can place the copies in different locations. I just feel like there’s got to be a more elegant solution to displaying multiples than statically predefining instances… (This is the coder in me striving for simplicity. Haha.)

By the way, I’m honored that THE Dan Ebberts is writing me. I love your page, sir! Inspirational! I wouldn’t be tackling these projects if it weren’t for you! 🙂

Many many thanks, Dan!

Ryan

[Ryan Lewis]

My first post in what seems to be an awesome community here…

I may be asking this wrong, but how would one change the content of a frame to be the content of an image or layer in the project? (And where would I add such an expression???)

For example:
– I have one layer making calculations about source footage.
– I have several other images that need to show up if/when certain conditions are met
– Each image could potentially be shown 0, 1, or multiple times, so I don’t want to create a layer for each instance. I’d rather dynamically determine if/when/how-many-times to show each. (Does that make any sense?)

Many thanks! And glad to be a part of AE Expressions group on CC!

Cheers!
Ryan

switch(i)
{
case 1:
// show image1.jpg at position x,y
break;
case 2:
// show image2.jpg at position x,y
break;
case 3:
// show image3.jpg at position x,y
break;
default:
// do nothing
}