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How can I control childrens brightness and visibility from null layer?
I am making a 3D scene – AE style 😀
I have a 3D null layer acting as parent to my planes (layers forming a wooden beam)
Now the idea is of course to have a nice control over the shy children layers (like scale, position etc.)Question:
Can i have the children layers hide too when i click the eye icon to hide the null layer? (Would be great in the design phase)
Also: is there an easy way to set a parents children to have the same -say- brightness?
It will probably work through expressions (expressed for EACH child layer), but some sort of universal child expressions? -
8 Replies
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[thor64] “…but some sort of universal child expressions?”
No, all expressions have to be linked explicitely, there is no automatic inheritance of parent expressions and the parameters/ effects they drive. Attributes such as layer visibility are read-only (isVisible), you’d have to use the opacity parameter to “hide” your child layers.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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ok. Well, thanks anyway 😀
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you could do what you want but not without adding an expression to each child.
to control opacity try putting a slider on your null. The slider is tied to opacity of the null by the pickwhip, then add an expression to each child that looks at the value of slider on the null. Now when you animate the opacity the slider copies the values and any layer looking at the slider would follow. come to think of it, you may not need the slider.
I think there’s also a way for an expression to tell whether or not a layer is visible by using a true statement. I don’t have my notebook with me but I think Dan Ebberts wrote something like “if visibility(not the right term probably) = true then…” which you could add to the expression to turn transparency to 0 on each of the children. this wouldn’t turn off the eyeball, but it would make the layer invisible.
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“active” is the layer attribute you’d want to test (true if the eyeball is on, false if it’s off).
Dan
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ah thanks!!
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thisComp.layer(“beam_long”).active=effect(“Checkbox Control”)(1);
the checkbox should turn the beam_long layer on and off, right?
doesn’t work. -
No, you can’t turn the active attribute on and off with an expression (and even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to do it from an expression in another layer). What you’d have to do is have an opacity expression in “beam_long” that looks at the active attribute of another, “master” layer.
Dan
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Ok thanks. That cleared things up 😀
BTW: Will AE not render 100% transparent layers?
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