• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Parenting layers in a hierrachy

  Posted by Darie Alexandru on October 7, 2010 at 10:32 pm

  I am working on a complex character animation project and I would need to parent one layer in a comp to anoter layer from a comp higher in hierarchy…how can I achieve that ? Do you have any ideas for an expression to solve the problem ?

  Darie Alexandru replied 15 years, 11 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

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  Dan Ebberts

  October 7, 2010 at 10:53 pm

  Well, there is no parenting across comps. Depending on exactly which properties you need to control, you might be able to do it with expressions, but implementing a full-blown expression-based parent simulation would be pretty challenging.

  Here’s one example. With parenting, you attach the child to the parent. If you move the parent, the child moves. If you try to simulate that with an expression, when you move the parent, the expression has no idea where the parent used to be (unless the move is keyframed) so it doesn’t know what to do. So you can’t do the static positioning that you can do with parenting. I gets complicated in a hurry.

  Dan
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  Darie Alexandru

  October 7, 2010 at 10:58 pm

  thanks, now I know that the parenting stuff was a bad idea in the first place and I can try another workflow and get things moving 🙂

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