So I just started using AE this week. I'm a super newbie. Any assistance you give me is appreciated, but should also be dumbed down so I can follow it.
I'm making these dungeon tutorial videos for Final Fantasy XV and I started working on the first project.
I spent about an hour making 1 table and animating it, and I will obviously be using this same table for every dungeon tutorial, but rather than copying and pasting every layer and making new compositions and yadda yadda, I started looking into expressions today to achieve this (I'm assuming simple) effect that I'm going for.
So essentially, picture this in your brain.
The dungeon tutorial is something you'd see in a strategy guide. The first 30 seconds of the video feature: The Treasure you will find in the Dungeon, the Monsters you will fight in the Dungeon, the name of the Dungeon, the Dungeon Level, etc. And each of these things I will need to be able to customize for future dungeon tutorials, so naturally I don't want to spend 8 years editing these things keyframe by keyframe, that's just madness. I'd rather play the game.
I have 1 Composition named "Treasure Overview"
And this Composition is made up of 14 Pre-Comps.
Each Pre-Comp is basically a row in a table.
So picture the table as such:
| (Pre-Comp 1) TREASURE | SALE VALUE |
|---|
| (PC2) Earth Gemstone | 1500 |
| (PC3) Beautiful Bottle | 120 |
| (PC4) Strong Bone | 200 |
| (PC5) Rough Scales | 250 |
etc...
Each Pre-Comp is comprised of 4 layers:
- text: TREASURE
- text: SALE VALUE
- background for Treasure
- background for Sale Value
Super easy, nothing fancy
For simplicity sake, let's say that the first row of the table is at position (0,0)
That would put row 2 at (0,1)
row 3 at (0,2)
row 4 at (0,3) etc
I want to animate the rows in the table using expressions. So that the rows basically unfold vertically.
They all start at (0,0) and end up in their final position (0,1) (0,2) (0,3), etc
SO FAR, the only thing I've managed to do is create an expression on each layer so that the Y position is offset by 38 (the height of each pre-comp)
y = thisComp.layer(index-1).transform.position[1];
[0, y+38];
this sets the y value for each row in the final position that it's supposed to be in, but I can't get it to animate in succession.
I've tried looking up tutorials using valueAtTime()
and that works... but not really. I'm clearly missing something, because I can't seem to specify both the POSITION AND THE "DELAY in animation"
every time i follow these tutorials I get errors upon errors when I try to adjust the tutorials to fit what im trying to do
I need something like (pseduo-code incoming)
thisLayer.transform.position[0, y+38].valueAtTime(time + 5);
Something that will let me specify the start and end position and the delay in animation
using an expression
