Something different folks – this week’s tutorial uses no 3rd party plug-ins. It’s just a straight After Effects tutorial with some good expressions information.

I know what you’re thinking… No plug-ins? why is it on RGTV? Well, why not? Our goal has always been to help you learn cool stuff. And sometimes cool stuff, doesn’t need a plug-in. That doesn’t mean we can’t share the info. So…

In this episode of Red Giant TV, I’ll give you some cool tips for working with numeric text, for things like video game scores and other digital readouts.  No 3rd Party Plug-ins are used in this tutorial – Just straight After Effects.

You can watch it here.

Courtesy of Dan Ebberts, This tutorial uses 2 powerful expressions. Here they are:

1. Round to the nearest whole number:

s = thisComp.layer(”Null 1″).effect(”Slider Control”)(”Slider”);
Math.round(s)

2. Layer marker triggers addition to current value:

s = effect(”Slider Control”)(”Slider”);
n = 0;
if (marker.numKeys > 0){
n = marker.nearestKey(time).index;
if (marker.key(n).time > time){
n–;
}
}
s + n