Effects that stick with the layer, not the camera

[John Williams]

Hi there, you’re quite right, making a PreComp would do it but I’m not sure of the issues this flags up for your workflow. What can be helpful with precomping layers with effects on that you then want to change without continually going into the precomp is to ‘expression link’ the effects settings you want to change into a layer in your main comp (what many people don’t realise is that you can use the expression pick whip to link properties across comps, you just need to make sure you have both comp timelines open so you can pick whip from one to another, otherwise you will need to write the code to direct it to another comp in the same project .)

Anyway, if that doesn’t help because you have other PreComp issues, then another suggestion is to use shape layers (you didn’t specify what kind of 2D layer you need so if it can be done with a shape this would be a solution). Shape layers have their own inbuilt distortion tools to like ‘wiggle paths’ & ‘pucker and bloat’ which may give you the distortions you are after.

Hope something there helps;)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[Cassius Marques]

What are you using for the distortion?

[Matthew Boutros] “I realize I could have it in a pre-comp but this causes a whole bunch of other issues for me, as well as being extremely time intensive.”

This is not time intensive at all… you just pre-comp leaving attributes and cut/paste the effect inside.

The problem is that this default behavior, even though it is not optimal for your case, it should still be possible (effects should be able to react to composition/world space instead of layer space). So any workaround may be more trouble than the standard pre-comp workflow.

Can you describe what’s causing trouble when pre-comping so I can see things better?

Cassius Marques
http://www.zapfilmes.com

[Matthew Boutros]

Thanks guys, I really appreciate the time you took to respond. You’re right, this isn’t the key part of the problem – it’s basically that I can’t Continually Rasterize vector, without coming back to this same problem.

I’ve made a new thread that more specifically tackles this problem.
Thanks again

nourishingmedia.com