Could someone please explain to me what “collapse transformations” does in simple English?

[Steve Roberts]

You’ve been using AE for 10 years and you don’t have Chris and Trish Meyer’s Creating Motion Graphics books? They have a whole chapter (twelve pages) in their Volume 1 dedicated to that switch.

… so I don’t think I can improve upon their description, especially since they consider it one of AE’s more advanced concepts. 🙂

Steve

[Graham Quince]

i won’t attempt a full explanation either but the way i think of it is this:

If i’m building a 3D news virtual set, i will build the desk in a separate comp then drop it into the main comp. Turning on the 3D setting on the desk comp layer will allow me to produce a weird “Superman 2 phantom zone” effect. But if i click the Collapse Transformations option, the desk is now a 3D object within the set.

It gives me more control, doesn’t fill up the main comp with hundreds of layers and allows me to duplicate easily.

I should add that i’m no expert, and im sure i’m missing the bigger points of Collapse Transformations, but this is how i think of it.

Hope that helps

Graham

http://www.qcit.com

[Mylenium]

Well, like Steve said, you can’t really beat the Meyer’s explanations. In more mathematical/ programming terms it’s simply a switch to make AE consider original data and apply operations to it instead of working with already calculated values. This is a very complex topic and your question opened a whole can of worms, so it’s better to let the matter rest before falling into endless discussions.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Steve Roberts]

What Mylenium said. 🙂

[Dan Ebberts]

Let me take a crack at it with a simplified example.

Say you have a layer in a precomp and the precomp is in a main comp. In the precomp you have the layer scaled to 25%. In the main comp you have the precomp scaled to 400%. So, in the main comp your layer will appear to be at 100% scale, but it will look like crap because it has been scaled 400%. Unless… you turn on the continuously rasterize switch for the precomp.

With the switch on, when After Effects displays the layer in the main comp is says “Hmmm, scaled down by 25% then up by 400%. How about if we just leave it at 100%?” (That’s what it says – I swear I’ve heard it). So basically it does the minimum transformation necessary to arrive at the final result, which results in optimum sharpness.

The switch performs a different (but similar) function when used with Illustrator layers. Instead of rasterizing the vectors and then scaling (as usual), AE will first recalculate the scaled vectors, then rasterize, maintaining the layer’s sharpness.

Now go read the Meyers’ book. 🙂

Dan

[Yoondo]

In my opinion, unless you are in a position where you have to explain this sort of thing to someone technically, why would anyone need to know what it means? Just know what it does and how it can help your project. Isn’t life already too complicated?

There is an old saying:

KISS it (Keep It Simple Stupid)