I seem to recall this being pretty easy. I just want a group of stars to move around in a circle. I can't seem to figure out how to do this the easy way. It seems like you could just create a circular mask and some how get them to travel along that path?
Re: animate around a circle. by Dave LaRonde on Apr 9, 2008 at 5:28:01 pm
[malcolm man]"I just want a group of stars to move around in a circle."
I presume this group of stars is a high-quality JPEG from NASA. If it isn't, please elaborate on what you really mean, because it could very well influence the advice you get.
Re: animate around a circle. by Malcolm Man on Apr 9, 2008 at 5:52:59 pm
ha ha. Sure thing. I have this logo. I want the stars to out from behind the logo on the same path, at the same rate of speed, and end forming a circle.
Like this:
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." --Albert Einstein
Re: animate around a circle. by Matthew McCarter on Apr 9, 2008 at 6:02:39 pm
Check out Andrew Kramer's Colorful Universe tutorial... He has an animation preset for a 360 Orbit... Just apply that preset to a layer, duplicate it, and work from there.
Re: animate around a circle. by Dave LaRonde on Apr 9, 2008 at 7:40:31 pm
Ah, so it's not a NASA picture. Well, here's how I'd do it, all in one comp.
• Position the logo where it needs to be. For the time being, it will be the bottom layer.
• Position ONE star at the top of the proposed arc, and add all the other stars in the same position. Or duplicate the one star a lot of times.
• Position a null object midway between the middle of the logo and the stars.
• Parent the first star to the null object.
• Rotate the null (5 degrees?), and parent the next star to the null.
• Repeat the step above until you've got an arc of stars. Now you've got all your stars evenly spaced, controlled by the null.
• Rotate the null to its starting rotational position. Yeah, yeah, you can still see all the stars. We'll fix it in a bit.
• Rotate the null to its ending rotational position. Happy with the rotation speed? Does the rotation ease out and in nicely? Good.
• Move the star layers down the timeline so that they appear just before they're about to emerge past the logo.
• Move the logo to the top layer in the comp.
Re: animate around a circle. by steve Roberts on Apr 9, 2008 at 8:18:00 pm
One way to do the group rotation thing is to take a null, and apply the Slider effect. Try setting it to 5. Make sure the anchor point of the star layer is at the center of the circle. Then you make an expression for the star layer's rotation that's something like "index*slider", where "slider" is the value of the slider you just made. Then you dupe the star layer a number of times. Each dupe will rotate a bit more than the previous one, since the index of the layer affects how much it rotates. Tweak the slider to make everything work out.
Now in your case, maybe you could animate the slider value from 0 to whatever.
Then you take that circle of stars and precomp it, then rotate it. It might work for you, or somebody may have a simpler solution ...
