Hi, I’m trying to recreate this four-pointed star animation style in After Effects.

The rotation and particle part are easy, but I can’t figure out how to make the star shape feel so organic when it stretches and contracts.

It doesn’t look like a simple scale animation. Is there a specific effect or technique used for this kind of fluid shape…

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UPDATE – I’ve duplicated both the object and the Null each time, and offset them as a pair. 👍

This works great for my object – I’m now unsure how to replicate and offset so that I have a stream of objects following the path. I’d previously duplicated and offset each layer (and thus positions) by ten frames, but here all the objects stick to the same null position despite offsetting the layer?

😀 Amazing, thank you so much! Checking it out now…

hey Jason i recorded a custom tutorial just for you with the solution, hope you like it! 🔥

https://youtu.be/CFGMeKDCktQ

Hi all, so, I’ve been a member for some 16 years and basically never said anything before, but I finally have something to say: I made a thing! It’s a free plugin/add-on for Chrome and Firefox (FF version is still in review, but live soon) that logs where you pull stock footage from and puts it into a CSV with links that track back to the…

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I have an object following a path that I’ve pasted onto its position. However I need that path to animate along the timeline. When I animate the path then paste the keyframes, I get two concurrent position keyframes, so the object first follows the first frame of the path, then moves back and follows the last frame of the path…

Given the major version upgrade recently, I’m a little surprised coming back to this forum that it’s so quiet – Creative Cow seems to have lost a lot of traffic, which is a shame as it’s always been my go to for all FCPX related.

That aside, I just wanted to comment re new version of FCPX with auto subtitling and auto-masking. I’m wondering if…

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Hi Don,

The issue might be related to the version you are using. I am not deeply familiar with importing animations from Mixamo, but generally speaking, many issues regarding Cinema 4D’s interaction with other software—as well as export/import processes—have been resolved in recent updates.

Finally ran this down, posting in case it saves someone else — the “Exception: std::exception, what:Failed to create transform rule” error may have nothing to do with your script, bins, or media.

Media Composer ships with an embedded Elasticsearch service that ScriptSync AI depends on. On my failing machine (macOS, MC 2025.12.1), that service was c…

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Amazing! Dan you rule.

Is this for an expression selector? If so, try this:

p = text.sourceText;
t = 0;
if (p.numKeys > 0){
	n = p.nearestKey(time).index;
	if (time < p.nearestKey(time).time && (n > 1)) n--;
	t = p.key(n).time;
}
wiggle(effect("wiggles / sec")("Slider"),effect("wiggle amount")("Slider"),1.0,0.5,t)

thanks Dan! the first one works great but the second one breaks. “Couldn’t turn result into numeric value”.
I wasn’t doing seedRandom for the text position, I was doing this:

myBeat=2.2166723315 ;
posterizeTime(myBeat) ;
wiggle(effect("wiggles / sec")("Slider"),effect("wiggle amount")("Slider"))

Not sure how to translate that into what you suggested.

There isn’t a way apparently. There is an “internal” list accessed by shift-clicking preferences or properties, but changing the default setting for video fades does nothing. The default is grayed out. This is weird since a linear fade would be basic, rather than a curve. Also, I seem to remember having changed it in a past version but forgot…

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Try replacing your posterizeTime() statement with this:

seed = 1;
if (numKeys > 0){
	seed = nearestKey(time).index;
	if (time < nearestKey(time).time) seed--;
}
seedRandom(seed,true);

and if you’re using the Expression Selector expression, try replacing the seedRandom() statement with this:

seed = 1;
p = text.sourceText;
if (p.numKeys > 0){
	seed =…

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Hi Sergio,

I think the problem might be with the belt points due to overlap between these points for several different belt tags. You need to enable the “Draw”
attribute in each tag used to display the connections of these points and confirm if the problem is caused by them. I hope this is helpful.

ok here’s where we’re at so far …
right now the text effects are time-posterized to the BPM of the song.
which is fine, but I’d also like to try making the distortion & text animation change only when the source text changes.
How to do that??? (ie, recalculate the distortion & other effects at every source.text keyframe).

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