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Dan Ebberts marker triggered animation won’t work with added actions
Hello, I searched the forums but couldn’t find a similar post. I use a lot the expression compiled by Dan Ebberts to trigger animation by markers and I think it’s awesome. However everytime I add actions to already set comps it just won’t work. Say I have a character’s head that I set up with some eye and mouth states. When first building the system it works fine but if later on I new to add new eye and/or mouth behaviours it just won’t work. The expression seems to find an error since it sends the animation to keyframe 0 in that particular timeline. This also happens with other kind of setups not only characters. Sometimes I remove the time remapping, apply it again, paste the expression again and it works but other times I’m stuck with the same problem. Restarting After Effects and even the PC doesn’t solve it either.
I’m sure others are experiencing this issue since I’ve had it in different PC’s on different system installations and AE versions. Has anyone found a solution to this?
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8 Replies
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Hey Sergio, any chance to get a glance to occurring error?
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Hi Tomas, thanks for taking time to help me. This is silly, I kept trying solutions and among the many things I did I threw a new “eyes” comp into my head composition, applied the time remapping and the corresponding expression and it worked. Now I can’t replicate the error. The only difference between the “eyes” comp I had in my head comp is that the old one was parented to a null and the new isn’t.
I’ll try to explain the error in more detail since I think it’s possible I run into it again. Imagine you have a “head” comp where you have “eyes” and “mouth” precomps. Imagine you set states for the eyes open, for blinking and for looking to the front and when calling them from the head comp it works fine. But days later you try to add a squint state. You go to illustrator, create the state and then import it into AE, place it on your “eyes” precomp, assign a marker for it but when calling it from the head comp it just won’t find the new marker inside the “eyes” comp. It sends the header to keyframe 0 on the “eyes” comp.
I hope this explains it.
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Well it happened again. This time with the mouth precomp. I tried the same solution I did before but it isn’t working. I’m adding screenshots this time to better explain the issue.
Here are the 3 states inside the mouth precomp
Here’s what happens in the head comp
As shown the marker “mm” on the mouth comp is not found. It’s checked against other labels so I know it’s not a typo kind of error.
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Update:
I think I found how to make it work. I purge all memory and then throw a new copy of the precomp inside the head comp, apply timeremapping and expression.It sure is a pain in the back so if anyone has a better more practical solution please tell me.
note:
I tried with the memory purge because after trying changing the marker labels inside the precomp I still got it to respond to the old labels in the head comp. For example, my original marker labels inside the mouth precomp were: “simplieSmile” and “bigSmile” and I changed them to “smile” and “big”. When I tried to call them from the head comp with the new names it didn’t find them but using their old labels in the head comp triggered the animation. -
Hey Sergio, not sure whether it would be useful, but do you know a feature when hitting right mouse click on a marker, allows you to update marker names in in source comp? In case you are using marker names in some fashion, try it out!
Other than that, probably the easiest way to help you out would be getting hands on a project and seeing problem in front (:
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Hi Tom, no I didn’t know of that and of course it helps for future projects. As I told you I use this expression a lot. I guess in the end this has to do with the expression sort of being burned into the layer and the cache. After a few previews it kind of fixes the state of the markers and the expression in the memory so any editing made is not taken into account. I’ll keep an eye on the issue as I’m sure I’ll face it again eventually and update this post with the new findings. Thanks a lot for your help and willingness to help.
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Hello again Tom, I ran into the same thing again but this time I think I found the culprit of all my problems. I’ve been working on a series of character animations. Every piece is unique but some scenes are reused from previous projects. At first I created, duplicated lots of AI files and comps inside AE depending on my needs still trying to be as tidy as possible. Needless to say I have a big mess on my hands after 2 chapters of the series. So I found that having duplicate comps with the same name “maleMouth” for example makes the expression unresponsive. That along with all the previous causes I pointed should be the reasons why I’m having the issue.
PD. I tried your tip on refreshing markers from original source but it always deletes all my markers on that layer. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
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I have projects from 2019 with several animation rigs setup using this expression, and they just simply stop working when I open the projects in 2020. Nothing has changed, they all just break, so I’m stuck using 2019 for the time being. Hopefully they can fix whatever the problem is.
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