[Sasha Zelman]

Thank you for all your help, Darby. It makes perfect sense now… My thinking was too convoluted not to see this solution…
Sasha

[Sasha Zelman]

I suspect that some very simple thing eludes my grasp, but I will try to explain myself better.
My goal is to work with a precomp of fixed length placed in longer comp and generate the longer random sequences than short comp allows.
For example: currently my 5 frame precomp generates AEDC-, and if placed in 20 frame comp the result is going to be AEDC-AEDC-AEDC-AEDC- but I need to squeeze more randomness out of 5 frame precomp.

You reply “Couldn’t that be generated just by selecting a new random frame at every frame?”

My understanding that new random frame at precomp level will generate just another 5-frame repeating sequence. So in a way my question is can precomp be changed in real time while longer comp is progressing through time?

It appears that you have already answered that question negatively by: “If your sequence (pre-comp?) is 10 frames long then you’ll always only have 10 frames to randomly select from”…

Sorry for the trouble.

PS.

Anyway the idea that you have mentioned (every random frame is repeated only once) is pretty cool… is there an expression for that?

[Sasha Zelman]

Additional randomization will generate MORE frames. Let’s say our random sequence is only 10 frames long. If we cycle it we will get repetition of the SAME frames. If we could cycle AND reset the seed we would get MORE random frames. Of course it is possible to just make original sequence longer… but that may not be convenient if you deal with multiple random sequences of preset length that you want to combine in a larger comp.

I may be missing something obvious of course, since my knowledge of AE is quite superficial…

[Sasha Zelman]

Thank you for the answer.
It is still difficult for me to accept that such impressive software as c4d would not have some sort of workaround with scripting or plug-ins… But may be not.

What does Global Space option do?

Thank you again.

[Sasha Zelman]

Thank you. I will look into it.

[Sasha Zelman]

You are right, no need for knife, since the whole thing can be done in Illustrator. From your example I kind of see the solution by using original image as texture for Shader Effector and Illustrator vectors (derived from the same image) as splines to extrude.

The possible problem comes from very random placements of gray-scale rectangles in question… but I guess I will need to experiment with this…

Thank you for your helpful answer!

[Sasha Zelman]

Thank you for your reply. I will check it out…
The usual problem with software that places elements by luminance is that it is not exact due to the fact that its internal grid is not matching pixel grid… Both in Photoshop (KPT Scatter) and in Cinema 4D you can place elements by luminance but results are unsatisfactory due to the above reason .

[Sasha Zelman]

That what I though… Too many items (pixels) to iterate through to determine coordinates… Too slow… Thank you, anyway.

[Sasha Zelman]

Thank you for your suggestion. Will do.

[Sasha Zelman]

I appreciate your answer, Wim. Somewhat similar solution occurred to me also – align first, then wiggle position of elements and key-frame the whole animation in reverse.A slider to control wiggle amplitude could make the whole process flexible enough for various scenarios.

But this whole approach is wrong for what I am trying to do: I have to start with random position values – some sort of noise, it is too time-consuming to manually align multiple elements to those random coordinates, so I am looking for built-in solution to align items to pixels or other items.

You see typically noise is used to DISPLACE EXISTING coordinates of elements and I am looking for a way to ACQUIRE NEW coordinates for elements, coordinates identical with coordinate values of brightest pixels of that noise.

Imagine that you have 100 star maps with thousands stars per map. Your task is to replace every star with new, better looking star graphic, but preserve the EXACT position of the original. Is there a way to do it fast in AE?