• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Reference a master comp without using the name

  Posted by Noel Powell on July 25, 2012 at 5:38 pm

  Hi,
  I’m in need of a way to reference a “parent” comp, or master comp, without using the comp’s name. I’m not sure if this is possible, but I’m hoping for some equivalent to “thisComp”, except it would reference the comp that “thisComp” is inside – if that makes sense.

  Here’s a summary of what I’m doing:
  I have a comp (“parent comp”) with a layer which has control sliders in it. My clients will repeatedly be duplicating this comp, then adding a precomp (“child comp”) that I have made. The child comp has a layer with effects which need to point to the control sliders of the parent comp. Ideally, the child comp effects would automatically point to the control slider of the parent comp that it is inside, so they don’t have to edit any text whenever they duplicate the parent comp.

  Anyone know if this is possible? Thanks in advance.

  Noel Powell replied 14 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Noel Powell

  July 25, 2012 at 5:41 pm

  Of course, if that magic piece of code doesn’t exist, I’d like to hear how you would approach this problem.
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  July 25, 2012 at 6:29 pm

  There’s no way for an expression to access a parent comp, other than by name. That makes sense when you think about it, because the precomp only gets rendered once, without regard for which, or how many, comps the result might be used in.

  You would have to use a new copy of the precomp each time, and with clever naming, you could have it access the parent comp based on the name of the precomp. For example: “Pre Comp 1” connects to “Main Comp 1”, etc. I don’t know if that helps though.

  Dan
• 

  Noel Powell

  July 25, 2012 at 7:36 pm

  Ok thanks, Dan. I’ll try to solve this another way.

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