Hitting a road block, trying to access Mesh 1 to add Puppet Pins in Ae with code

Introductions
1

I’m trying to be able to add puppet pins via jxs code in After Effects for a dev plugin/extension project I’m working on.

I’m aware there doesn’t seem to be a way to have code add the Puppet effects with code via the API. But found a simple approach to have the user click once to add one pin to add the effect.

I can then cycle through the Puppet effect properties, to try and find Mesh 1, so I can then go onto find the Deform section within that, and try and add (or duplicate and amend) Puppet Pins there.

But when I run this:

// // Print the names of all properties under the "Puppet" effect
// for (var i = 1; i <= puppetEffect.numProperties; i++) {
//     alert("Property " + i + ": " + puppetEffect.property(i).name);
// }

It outputs:

Property:
1: Puppet Engine Property
2: Mesh Rotation Refinement Property
3: On Transparent Property
4: arap
5: Compositing Options

But when I look in Ae myself I see

Property
1: Puppet Engine Property
2: Mesh Rotation Refinement Property
3: On Transparent Property
4: arap (it’s called ‘Auto-traced Shapes’ in the Ae UI)
5: Mesh 1
6: Compositing Options

So it seems that ‘Mesh 1’ is hidden to the code, as it definitely exists before running the code.

I’ve tried search by id number (i.e. 5) and it still finds compositing options, rather than ‘Mesh 1’.

An alternative approach would be to try and search for the ‘match name’ for the property.

Does anyone at Adobe (or other) know what the match name is for Mesh 1?

(Apologies if this is the wrong category to post, it’s not UXP development and so not sure what category this falls under).

2

Slight success… … it’s only taken all the hours in the world… but a recursive search of Puppet, does result in it finding ‘Mesh 1’… so it’s there somewhere. onwards.