Repeat/Reflect animation without precomp

Report · Jul 20, 2020

Hi everyone - I'm putting together an animation that relies heavily on symmetrical animation, but that mostly means doubling or quadrupling keyframes and when edits need to be made it makes the workflow very slow. (You can see below I'm just actively duplicating keyframes, this is no way to live)

I've tried repeaters but it seems that they don't like reflecting even if I set x scale to -100%
I tried the mirror effect but it obviously just creates a mirror line, I need a true duplicate that the original can seemingly interact with, and the transformations will be rotated 180° rather than reflected

I know I can precomp, duplicate and rotate but we all know that makes the timeline, project panel and comp panel messy and this has been my workaround for years, I know there must be a better way.

Any suggestions? Thanks

Report · Jul 21, 2020

Simple expressions that invert the values or subtract/ add offsets around the transform center. I'm pretty sure you can even find a simple script on AEScripts.com that already deals with it, if nothing else then Mamoworld. Otherwise you can easily learn this stuff. Could be literally something like this:

refLayer=thisComp.layer("XYZ");

refPosX=refLayer.transform.postion[0];
refPosY=refLayer.transform.postion[1];

midX=thisComp.width*0.5;
midY=thisComp.height*0.5;

offX=refPosX-midX;
offY=refPosY-midY;

X=midX-offX;
Y=midY-offY;

[X,Y]

Rinse-repeat for other properties and tweak values and ranges as needed.

Mylenium