Nested Comp Expression

[Michael Szalapski]

You can open up the timeline for both comps and pickwhip between them.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Walter Soyka]

[Brian Walsh] “I wanted to know if there is a way for an expression to refer to a layer inside the comp in which it is nested without actually typing out the name of the comp it is nested within.”

Not automatically. It’s a scope problem — the precomp has no idea what (if anything) it’s nested within.

You can, however, use an object so that you’d only have to refer to the main comp once. Open your expression with:
c = comp("Main Comp");

Now, instead of continually referring to comp(“Main Comp”) in your expression, you can use c as a kind of shorthand:
c.layer("Black Solid in Main Comp").transform.position

You can also change which composition the entire expression refers to by changing only that first line.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
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