[Steve Bentley]

You could also use the CC sphere to simulate this but its a little tricky because it’s not really 3D.
But just for a 2D ball , you can put an expression on the ball – you keyframe the rotation and then apply the math of: distanceTravelled = 2*Pie*R*rotationAngle/360
I couldn’t figure out how to post the symbol for Pie
R is the radius

This way the balls “sticks” to the ground as it rolls and doesn’t spin at the wong rate.

[Steve Bentley]

I haven’t tried this but you could precompose each layer with its mask. Then use the same expression on each of the resulting precomp layers.
The expression would get the width and height of each inner masked layer and then do some simple math to place the masked area at the center inside the precomp. The objects true anchor is still offset from the mask where it was, but because the masked area is now centered within the nested comp, the outer precomp layer would be centered, and have its anchor point in the center, and the object within would be centered to that. So the new anchor point is just the center of the outer comp.
The only downside is that once all the expressions are on each layer, all of your “objects” would be centered and stacked in the outer comp.
You could do this with one expression but it would be big and it might be easier to just copy and paste the same expression to all the layers.

The other way would be to use an expression to get the width and height of each layer’s masked area and apply a null to the calculated center of that masked area and use the null as your “anchor”. That way none of the layers move from where they were and you can drag or rotate you masked area with the new nulls.
There’s a bit of a snake chasing it’s tale in the last idea, so you might have to position the nulls with the expressions and then turn the expressions off (or delete them or convert expressions to key frames and then delete those) and link each layer to its newly positioned null using the parent picker.

[Steve Bentley]

Arent those three “lines” just the gaps between your polygon objects? You can always just make one big objects and join the three colors in one image too.
But in your project just make sure the each object is the same distance from the next object by the amount of its width (the distance from center to edge of object plus the distance of the next object from center to edge) – if they are all the same width, then that distance is just the object’s width.

[Steve Bentley]

And you have textures selected in the viewport Options menu?

[Steve Bentley]

You have to put all your objects inside a fracture object (from the Mograph menu) and then apply the effector (random, pushapart whatever) to the effector list in the fracture object.
Make sure the fracture objects is set to “straight” the default.

This is always the method to use any effector with a bunch of objects without cloning.

[Steve Bentley]

With the new layout you can also just sit on the left of your timeline window, at the left side of that first tab and hit the close button and every tab will chunk back to sit right where the last one was with the close button right under you mouse. Click, CLick, Click, all closed.

[Steve Bentley]

Here’s another link that might be helpful
https://www.motionscript.com/articles/speed-control.html

[Steve Bentley]

With the GPU turned off in AE’s prefs and in E3D’s prefs it shouldn’t matter what card you have ( it will just be a little slower).

[Steve Bentley]

You can pass the texture through the mask using a track matte and then apply the tracking data to both mask layer and texture layer, or better still apply the track data to the texture layer and then parent the mask layer to the texture layer so it follows along.

[Steve Bentley]

You could probably just track it in the built in tracker. But does the tracked layer move with the hand but just offset? If so you could just shift its anchor point over until it matches position and then it will be offset for the whole clip.