Create a gradient along a stroke with the ability to animate the offset of the gradient?

[Rembot2000]

Hi. I am trying to create a gradient along a stroke with the ability to animate the offset of the gradient continuously. I am essentially creating an animated progress bar, but I am doing it for a wayfinding map so the stroke wont always be a simple rectangle. The stroke has to follow the path of the store floorplan (and there will be in the neighborhood of 120 paths). Any thoughts and/or ideas are appreciated. Thanks.

[Mylenium]

Not easily. You would have to create multiple colored strokes with different lengths, animate their offsets, blur them and then use yet another stroke on top as a matte. AE unfortunately has no real gradient along a path and even third-party stroke effects offer no such facility. Other than that you might want to give this a whirl:

BAO Boa - aescripts + aeplugins - aescripts.com

Mylenium

[Rembot2000]

Shoot really? That is a bummer

BAO looks interesting. It looks to have some of the parameterization i was hoping to see in a gradient-along-path function so maybe I can work with it. Thanks

Also just to create maybe a clearer idea of what I am trying to do, I am trying to create a 'microsoft windows loading bar' effect. The part of the effect I am trying to recreate is how it has the highlight that races down the green portion of the progress bar while user waits for program to do whatever its doing. I attached an image of the effect.

My problem is that I need the effect to function down the length of custom shapes (like the one below) rather then just down a linear rectangular space (as in the microsoft example). Might be able to do it in a 3d program but was curious if there was a way to just do it in Ae. Thanks!

[Rembot2000 · Accepted solution]

Well after trying a couple other options I ended up given BAO Boa a try. It is working very well for my needs. At first I was going to go with another solution I found in these forums using text elements but it was basically much harder to work with and much harder to get a consistent effect over my variable length paths. Boa has been pretty straight forward so far, just followed the tut and made my own grayscale texture element in illustrator and animate it along the path, works great!

[Kevin-Monahan]

Thanks for sharing what worked for you.

Kind regards,
Kevin