In today’s tutorial we are going to look at a feature of Adobe After Effects that I’ve used in most of my tutorials without ever going into too much detail: expressions. Instead of keyframing a property in After Effects you can write a little piece of code, an expression, that controls the value of the property for you. This expression can be very simple or very complex and you can introduce some intelligent logic into your composition and create some amazing visual effects. Diving into Expressions I am going to approach this tutorial a little bit differently. I will throw you into the deep end first and then pull you back out so we can look at all of the details that we missed the first time around.

To get started with this tutorial, create a new composition. Add a new text layer anywhere into your scene and change the text to ‘Slider Value: ‘. Then create a new and call it ‘CONTROL’. Search for and apply the ‘Slider’ effect to the null object. Finally, add keyframes to the Slider effect to animate the value of the slider to increase from 0 to 100 over the course of your composition. Your composition should now look something like this: Expand the text layer until you can see the Source Text property and ALT-click onto the little stopwatch icon. Yes, this will add an expression, but I will cover that in more detail soon.

For now just follow along and in the little text editor that appears in your timeline window on the right side type 'My slider value: ' + and then, with the active cursor still in the text editor, drag the pick whip icon on the left side onto the Slider value on the CONTROL null object and let go. This will insert even more code into your little expression, but we will look at that later.

So, I really want to learn more about After Effects Expressions. I was wondering if any of you experts could give me a brief and simple. Learn how to use expressions in Adobe After Effects to unlock a whole new world of intelligent control over your effect parameters!

Add ‘.value.toString()’ to the end of your expression to convert the slider value to a string and then click outside of the text editor. The text in your composition should now be animated and display the value of the slider when you scrub through your composition.

This setup will make it a lot easier for you to see how expressions affect the slider value. So now let’s come back from the deep end and look at the very basics of expressions in Adobe After Effects! May 2, 2015 1:01 pm Hi there!!!

I have a question, i followed the steps on your webpage, but the expression on the source text isnt working for me so i cant really start with the tutorial:/ after i pick whip the source text with the slider effect i got this error invalid numeric result (divide by zero ) this is how my expression looks: “slider value: ” + thisComp.layer(“CONTROL”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”) what could it be my mistake? THanks a lot!! You really do a great job!!!

There are a handful of ways to make an animation repeat itself infinitely within Adobe After Effects, but arguably the simplest and most universally effective of them is the Loop Expression. Let’s take a look at how to apply it. 100 Years Telugu Calendar Pdf. Step 1: The Expression The Loop Expression has a simple structure, with two variations: Cycle and PingPong. Cycle (Default): LoopOut(“Cycle”); This expression will create a standard infinite loop from the start to end of an animation, as indicated by “ Cycle.” The red ghost keyframes are shown to indicate what this animation would look like done manually.

Cycle Modeis the default Loop mode, so you can actually achieve the same effect with: LoopOut(); PingPong: LoopOut(“PingPong”); The PingPong variation of the Loop expression will create an infinite loop, only instead of cycling the animation over and over, it will animate forward, then in reverse, then forward again, and so on. Step 2: Application Applying to a Property: The Loop Expression is applied to the expression feature of a layer’s property. For instance, if you wanted a layer to grow and shrink infinitely, you would keyframe a layer’s scale property appropriately, then apply the Loop Expression to it by alt-clicking the keyframe button. Applying to Entire Layer: If you would like to loop a layer in its entirety, even imported footage, you can do so by applying the Loop Expression of your choosing to the Time Remapping feature of the layer. Simply right-click the desired layer, select Enable Time Remapping, then apply the loop expression to the layer. If this generates a blank frame at the loop point of your layer (a common problem), you can fix it fairly easily; Create a new keyframe at the last frame of your layer, one frame prior to the keyframe that Time Remapping created. Copy your new keyframe and paste it over the keyframe that Time Remapping created, so that there are two of the same keyframe ending the layer’s Time Remapping.