[AE] Does this kind of Expression exist? (reference included)

[Jumpman47 0]

Pardon me if this is in the wrong section... Long time lurker, first time poster

 

 

I was wondering if there was a way to make individual objects in a precomp to have their own independent wiggle positions with a simple expression?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PILFq6NVEK4

Here is a video that has the effect I'm going for (it's at the 1minute mark). The only problem is I don't feel like setting the wiggle parameters for each object, so I was wondering if there is an expression that I could apply to the precomp that does an effect to all the grouped objects? I know when just adding wiggle to the precomp it effects it as a whole rather than idividual. Does that make sense? lol.

 

Hopefully there is a way because in my specific comp there are hundreds of individual materials and I dont want to set wiggle to each individual one.

 

Thanks in advance,

JM

[Trione 0]

If you want a bunch of objects to have the same expression you should select the property and go to edit/copy expression only. Then select any layers you want to have the expression and hit paste.

[dotcommer 0]

Its also possible to set up a single expression that adjusts the wiggle's seed value depending on its place in the hierarchy of your layers, then copy/paste that expression to all of them, and each one will have a slight different seed value, making them all wiggle a little differently. Somewhere online I recall seeing how to set up the wiggle to have a seed value, and somewhere else there's a write up on how to use the number of the layer in your comp as a value to drive the expression.

[Trione 0]

You don't need to change up the values in the wiggle expression. Each instance will be different.

[dotcommer 0]

You don't need to change up the values in the wiggle expression. Each instance will be different.

 

Really? I could have sworn if you type in wiggle(x,x), it has a specific "under the hood" seed value it uses, and any layer that has a wiggle expression with the exact same variables would generate the same exact wiggle animation...

[Trione 0]

Really? I could have sworn if you type in wiggle(x,x), it has a specific "under the hood" seed value it uses, and any layer that has a wiggle expression with the exact same variables would generate the same exact wiggle animation...

 

 

They'll be different. Test it out.

[graymachine 0]

Yeah, it's the opposite of what you are thinking. You'd have to specifically force each one to call on the same random seed. Otherwise, each layer has a different random seed based on its index (layer #).

 

That said, if you have two comps, each layer "x" in one comp will have the same wiggle values as layer "x" in the other comp. In other words, Layer 17, for example, in one comp will have the same values as layer 17 in the other comp. This is where you would force different values with seedRandom().

 

Wiggle on.

 

[Colin@movecraft 0]

random() and wiggle() both add random data to your values but with different methodologies. It's common to use the index value of a layer as the random seed for the random() function. seedRandom(index,1) for example. Check out Graymachine's tutorials for far more lucent and well presented examples:)

 

c