[Trent Armstrong]

I’m not too sure exactly what you are looking for but a very simple way to get a sort of tapered look on a stroke around a shape is to use the shape tool as a mask on a solid instead of creating a shape layer. Then apply VEGAS to the layer. It will look at the mask and give you tapered segments.

Set the segments to 1
Length to about 0.28
Width around 7
Hardness to about 0.5

Then use a negative rotation to get the stroke to move along the mask path in what appears to be positive direction with the tail trailing behind.

Let me know if that doesn’t give you what you are looking for.

Trent

Trent Armstrong – Creative Cow Leader
https://www.dallasaeug.com

[Trent Armstrong]

With TimeRemap you can also use the loopOut(“Cycle”, #) where the”#” is the number of the last keyframes you want to loop.

You might set up a dummy keyframe in your timeremap at your loop point. You would then have 3 keyframes: beginning, Dummy, and End.

Apply this expression loopOut(“Cycle”, 2) and the AE will count backwards from End and jump back to Dummy which is two keyframes back. That is where it will loop to.

I humbly submit this in the shadow of Dan Ebberts.

Trent

Trent Armstrong – Creative Cow Leader
https://www.dallasaeug.com

[Trent Armstrong]

If you’re using video that was shot SD, then it’s almost a wash. But if you have the original project with decent resolution images, you can duplicate your comp and make it 1280×720 and then do one of two things.

You can move your camera to reframe the shot (assuming you have a camera) or put a null in the scene, parent everything to that Null, then rescale the null until everything looks pretty good in the frame.

If everything has been designed with SD in mind, then you might need to do a lot of rearranging but these two methods have worked for me on numerous occasions.

Trent

Trent Armstrong – Creative Cow Leader
https://www.dallasaeug.com

[Trent Armstrong]

Hi!

Depending on how complicated it needs to be, you might just need to use the pickwhip to link the Y Rotation of all successive layers to the first layer that rotates.

Trent

Trent Armstrong – Creative Cow Leader
https://www.dallasaeug.com

[Trent Armstrong]

This might be all you need to look at. https://www.motionscript.com/mastering-expressions/simulation-basics-2.html

It simulates gravity as a sine curve is damped to 0. Very cool for math! 🙂

Trent

Trent Armstrong – Creative Cow Leader
https://www.dallasaeug.com

[Trent Armstrong]

I’m trying to hold off on doing this tutorial, but you can render a 360

[Trent Armstrong]

A good trick here is to set your comp to be ONE frame long and then do the Convert to Keyframes trick. That gives a fast result and only one keyframe to delete for each layer.

Trent

[Trent Armstrong]

There is one hang up here. I’m not sure if this applies to what you are doing but the layers all have to be the same dimension for the expression to work in the right places.

The precomping idea is the best there if you have to have a 3D layer that is not the right dimensions.

Trent

[Trent Armstrong]

This sounds fun! Can’t wait to see the final product!

Try selecting all keyframes and put your play head at the frame where you want the last keyframe to be (multiple of 6: 12, 18, 24) then option or alt select the last keyframe and hold opt shift as you drag toward the time marker. Opt will evenly scale the time b/w keyframes and shift will lock the last keyframe to where the time marker is sitting.

Trent

[Trent Armstrong]

Check this tutorial for AE 8 from Maltaannon.com

https://maltaannon.com/tutorials/AfterEffects/cePixelSampler/

Another way to gather the RGB values is to use the imageSample() expression. More information here:

https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/sample-image.html

Trent