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Any way to change properties of subcomp based on parent comp?
I have a dozen ‘main’ comps which have a bunch of nested comps. I need to create about 30 versions of each main comp, with different colors.
The subcomps are animated shapes, which take their color from a color picker in the main comp.
I would love to avoid having to duplicate all the subcomps 30 times, so I don’t have hundreds of copies.Is there ANY way to allow a nested comp to change based on the comp within which it is nested?
I know there is no “thisComp.parent” option — since a comp can be nested in many different parents — but is there a way to “push” a property “down” into a subcomp? Or any clever workaround? Does this make sense?
E.g., main comp “M01” has subcomps “S01a”, “S01b”, etc. The colors of shapes in S01a etc are based on a color picker in M01.
I want to duplicate M01 to M02, change the color picker value, and have S01a S01b pick up the new color value, without having to duplicate them to S02a, S02b, etc in order to reference M02.I’m using True Comp Duplicator, which is a lifesave with its ‘update expressions’ option … but my project is over 50MB now, with hundreds of comps, and is unwieldly.
(I cannot use a ‘change color’ effect in the main comp; there are transparencies & blend modes that would get messed up.)
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3 Replies
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>Is there ANY way to allow a nested comp to change based on the comp within which it is nested?
No. A nested comp can’t render differently in one parent comp than it does in another. The best you can do is set the expressions up so that they calculate the name of the parent comp to reference based on the name of the sub-comp. That requires a duplicate sub-comp for each version though.
Dan
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That’s what I was afraid of, Dan!
Another option is to make one big comp and put the different color versions in order … and have the color picker vary over time … but then I have the issue of splitting that up into multiple render items.
There used to be a script by Jeff Almasol called “rd_RenderLayers” — but I cannot find it anywhere.
And https://www.redefinery.com/ seems to be down.
Is there an alternative? Was it free? Does someone have a copy? Or any way to split up one comp into multiple output files, by layer or marker, or something?
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Jeff Almasol’s redefinery website is back up, and he’s making his scripts available again:
https://bit.ly/AE_RD_scripts———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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