-
Parented Objects Randomly Flying Apart Upon Render
Hi Everyone,
I’m currently working in CS6 and my OS is Windows 7. The problem I’m having is this:
I created and animated a monkey by first isolating each of its body parts in photoshop, saving each of those body parts as png files against transparent backgrounds, importing those parts into after effects so that each part is on its own layer, then parenting those layers accordingly. Everything looked great, until further renderings of an increasingly complicated scene started causing body parts to become dislocated in random ways. For example, I’d have the monkey’s forearm parented to said monkey’s upper arm and then, upon render, that very same forearm would be floating in the air on some ungodly trajectory.
When this first started happening, I assumed it was because I’d copied and pasted layers as a means of creating both the right and left appendages, rather than having saved the images individually as “left_monkey_forearm” “right_monkey_forearm” etc. In other words, I thought that the parenting feature might be getting “confused” by all these layers with the same names, parented to the same host object, but with different animations. So, I re-saved the images under different names and… voila! That seemed to fix the problem. That was two months ago…
Now, this problem has suddenly returned. I should note that I haven’t even touched that scene since I “fixed” the issue two months back. In that time, countless renderings with no similar issues. Then I started adding audio. At first, all was well. But, for whatever reason, the last sound I added (which isn’t even located on the same area of the timeline as the monkey, btw) seems to have caused body parts to fly off again.
Might anybody have an idea as to why this is happening? Pleas help.
Thanks for taking the time.
-Matt
-
4 Replies
-
Sometimes when I get weird behavior like this, I purge the cache: Edit > Purge > All. I usually purge the cache before the final render also.
-
Are you using any expressions in your comp? The parenting feature doesn’t use layer names, layer index or layer order to form the parent/child relationship, but expressions can.
Darby Edelen
-
I’ll try that. Thanks for the response.
-
I’m not using any expressions for parenting, no. I’ve been parenting them by whipping them together. Would using expressions be the safer method?
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up