[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Saso, any unusual expressions you used there?

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Gabriel, few questions:

1. How do you ‘draw’ the lines initially? Is it based on motion tracker data?
2. How do you animate the lines? Is it done manually?

Based on answer above, I might have a different solution than Graham has suggested, based on shape paths instead (you could control the stroke width to achieve ‘filling effect’).

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After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey, apply ‘Change to Color’ and then do the following – affect ‘Change’ and ‘Change By’:

Change – from ‘Hue’ to ‘Hue saturation & lightness’
Change By – from ‘Setting to Color’ to ‘Transforming to Color’

It might still not be exactly as you want to, but this will interpret more transforming changes, and chances are you could get away with this, by tweaking the tolerances below.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Evan, what you need to do is the following:
1. Close down all layer properties (arrow on the left )
2. Reveal all layer properties again, inside ‘Text’ section there will be ‘More Options’.
3. See how anchorpoint grouping as well as grouping alignment can suit your needs.

Hope this helps !

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Xavier, in the past I have noticed, that exporting through Render Queue in general takes less time than through AME. if it comes about complex structure projects – thats even more of a case. Of course, you would still need to encode lossless output to web-use format once render is finished, but as a ballpark – it should still be faster.

And accordingly – you could scale the comps down in AE directly.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Drew, just keep in mind ‘Transform Effect’ does not behave in the same way when parented/collapse transformed. So while it works great in some cases, in some it will fail (especially with positioning/anchor). Other than that, for simple transformations its definitely a good choice.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Florian, could you please clarify what specifically did you mean by saying ‘in bash’?

As otherwise, i guess you just need to pass absolute path of file with functions /variables to ‘eval’.

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After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Dan, that is exactly what I was asking – thank you a ton!

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After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Andrei, thanks a lot for your insights!

Yesterday I tried all possible scenarios without any luck. Yet today, first thing in the morning solution literally popped into my hear… The comp is not active in my script !

With that said, not sure how this slipped through, but yourLayersComp.openInViewer() solves this in ease ☺

Thanks for participating, Andrei, there was a bunch of useful pin points to check.

On the other hand, is there a way to control ‘time duration’ of pasted roving end keyframe, without deleting and creating a new keyframe?

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Thanks a lot for your help Andrei! I just narrowed down this up to the point, that it definitely works in a blank project, but it doesn’t in my ‘shape case’.

If I trigger this script in a dummy project and stop after ‘copy’ step, data is copied.
If I do the same in my script – it doesn’t.

This leads to the point, where copying does not execute, just passes that step without any thrown error either. I can see the only reason myself:
*Not properly built shape path?* I have a shape layer in the comp, which contains plain ‘Contents’ such as stoke and fill.

var shapeLayer = comp.layer(1);
var pathShape = new Shape();
var pathGroup = shapeLayer.property("Contents").addProperty("ADBE Vector Group");
pathGroup.name = "path";
var myPath = pathGroup.property("Contents").addProperty("ADBE Vector Shape - Group");


Then just applying vertices array built in other step:

pathShape.vertices = verticesArray;
myPath.property("Path").setValue(pathShape)
pathGroup.moveTo(1);

Path builds without any problems, with proper vertices.

If you see a way where to look further, it would be amazing to receive some guideline, as I am hitting head into a wall for a while already!

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview