• Adobe After Effects

  best way to nest objects?

  Posted by N8wn8w on April 8, 2007 at 1:29 pm

  What is the best way to nest objects?

  For example
  I would like to have a character walking .. he is made up of 3 parts: head, torso and legs

  Each one of those parts has it’s own composition
  head (3 frames)
  torso (4 frames)
  legs (15 frames)

  I have a master comp called “walking” to composite these parts
  Does this master comp “walking” comp have the same number of frames as the longest part (ie legs 15 frames?
  Should I build these with precomps vs comps?
  Should I just have 1 frame in the master comp and use expressions to loop the parts?
  What is the best way to go about this?

  Thanks

  Nate Williams
  https://www.n8w.com

  Nate Williams
  https://www.n8w.com

  N8wn8w replied 19 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Darby Edelen

  April 9, 2007 at 3:51 am

  You’ve got a pretty good grasp of the concept of nesting compositions. Here’s how I would specifically go about this project:

  Create a precomp* for each of the individual body parts, each of these compositions only needs to be as long as that body part’s animation. Then put each of these pre-comps into an intermediary comp (another pre-comp) and loop them with time remap and a loopOut() expression. You should then have all three body parts looping through their respective animations in this intermediary comp. Make this intermediary comp 60 frames long (60 is evenly divisible by the number of frames in all of your looping animations). Then place this comp into your final output composition and loop it.

  FYI, the answer to ‘Should I build these with precomps vs comps?’ is: both. A precomp is just a name for a normal composition that is nested in another composition, the precomp functionality in AE allows you to automatically nest layers into a new composition that will then be placed in the composition you pre-comped from (confused?). For example, if you imported a circle from Photoshop and placed it in your main comp, then decided you wanted it pre-comped you could use the pre-comp function in AE. If you already knew you wanted it ‘pre’-comped then you could’ve created a new composition for the PS circle, placed it in this ‘pre-comp’ and then put the ‘pre-comp’ in your main comp.
• 

  N8wn8w

  April 9, 2007 at 12:50 pm

  hey thanks .. super helpful

  here is a really great animation trick related to this thread .. by animation with prime numbers .. it takes longer for you animation to repeat

  https://www.jamesor.com/2006/09/03/prime-time-animation/

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