[Stefan Zerdzinski]

Thank you. That’s a really useful technique to know but it doesn’t help with this particular problem as you would still have to create layers over each lightbulb to then parent the optical flare layer to.

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

Aha! I’ve figured out why it was messing up.
In order to split the two lines of text up I pressed Enter. This seems to be changing something to do with the text index.

I replaced the text with a text box and then made the text box smaller in order to force the text across 2 lines. This seems to work absolutely fine now.

Do you know why having a… I don’t know what you’d call it… Line Break? would mess things up?

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

Weirdly it still isn’t working.
I’ve purged the cache and restarted my computer to make sure that’s not affecting the result.

This is the result from using your new code above. It’s the same result.

I’ve noticed that if I change [textIndex-1] to just [textIndex] then I get the following result.

Which makes things correct on the second line of text but wrong on the first line.
Incidentally it works flawlessly for text that’s only on a single line.

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

I’m afraid I can’t be very specific because I haven’t used the iMac that much. One thing I have noticed though is that there is a particular font we use for a client called Kirkwood that’s made up of lots and lots of little bits and pieces and using it on our old 2009 Mac Pros was a nightmare. It took forever to render and just modifying the text or changing its position took 5 – 10 seconds or more. The new Mac Pros are make this process far more tolerable but there is still a small amount of lag. The iMac just seems more responsive for this particular task to me. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for getting back to me.
That’s certainly a lot neater.

Using that exact code, I’m still getting errors. Has it got anything to do with the text being on 2 lines messing up the index? If I make it so that it’s all on one line then the correct letters are highlighted.

As you can see in the example below when it’s on 2 lines, some of the wrong letters are highlighted.

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

I managed to achieve something although it’s not quite right.
I added a red fill color and an expression selector to the text and added the following expression to the “amount” property:

txt = text.sourceText;
c = txt[textIndex];
if (c == “t”)
100
else if (c == “g”)
100
else if (c == “i”)
100
else if (c == “f”)
100
else if (c == “T”)
100
else if (c == “G”)
100
else if (c == “I”)
100
else if (c == “F”)
100
else
0;

I’m sure there is an easier way to say if the text is either t,g,i or f then do this but I don’t know what it is.
Anyway using this method it seemed to work but then I noticed there were a couple of random r’s that were red and some of the i’s weren’t.

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

Set the anchor point of your first solid to 0,0 and then set the position to 0,0. Make sure it is the first layer in the comp.
In the position property add the expression.

x = (index-1)*240;
[x,transform.position[1]];

Then duplicate the layer (ctrl+d) / (cmd+d) 7 times.

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

A hole in the table certainly sounds like a good way to do it.
Then simply recreate the surface and overlay your sugar animation over the top of it at the point of impact.

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

We bought some “new” Mac Pros at work recently. They are fairly decent and feel pretty fast for the most part but you can tell when performing certain actions that it’s using old tech. The new iMac we got a little while ago outperforms it at certain tasks.