-
Preset: Snapping to Hex Grid
May 11, 2012
The Idea So last year about this time I was doing some motion & comp work for a pair of cinematics for a big ol’ video game. One of my shots involved having these indicators moving across a screen with a hexagonal tile grid, and the art director wanted the indicators to snap from one tile to the next, giving it a much choppier, digital feel. It took a while (longer than I’d care to admit, but alas) to get…
Keep Reading → -
Preset: Points Along a Line
April 23, 2012
Things have been busy! I’m working on several cool projects at the moment, one of which led me to share some cool math with you guys. I’ve got two expressions that produce similar (yet different!) results– both define the position for a point along a line, though one is controlled by % completion from one point to the next (0-1), the other by the distance (in pixels) from the start point.
Keep Reading → -
toFixed() – Limiting decimal points
March 5, 2012
In today’s thrilling post I’m going to cover how to limit the number of digits after a decimal while working with expressions. While I know of a few ways to go about doing this, I’m going to cover the toFixed() method.
Keep Reading → -
For / While Loops
February 10, 2012
In class yesterday, one of my students asked about using for / while loops in expressions. As this isn’t something I’ve had to use before, I spent the evening playing around with it. The main concern is that AE evaluates the entire expression at every frame– there’s no persistence. So any for or while loop will run through in its entirety per frame. If you tried, say, to execute some code while the time is less than 1 second: while…
Keep Reading →