Preserve animation of nested precomp when parent comp is freezed by time remap?

Adobe After Effects

Preserve animation of nested precomp when parent comp is freezed by time remap?

Posted by Rodolfo Chains on May 20, 2020 at 7:11 pm

I have a precomp of an airplane tilting left/right (ie: frame1=all left / frame100=all right), which is time remapped and controlled in its parent comp with expressions. ie: with a slider control I move the currentframe of airplane from 1 to 100. That’s ok.

I’d like to have a propeller animation precomp looping INSIDE the airplane precomp, and have it continually playing even when it’s parent(airplane) is stopped(by the time remap).

I thought the propeller precomp timeline wouldn’t be affected by it’s parent timeline but it is.
ie. if the parent (airplane) timeline stops, its child (propeller) timeline also stops.

Is there a workaround to this? (without taking the propeller out of the airplane)?

I hope this makes sense, any help/tips much appreciated!

Rodolfo Chains replied 6 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Walter Soyka
May 20, 2020 at 8:09 pm

Don’t use time-remapping. Use the new-ish Master Properties feature instead — then you can animate the propeller continuously and still adjust the tilt however you like.

This will help make it clearer:
https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/master-properties-after-effects/

And here are the official docs:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/master-properties.html

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
Rodolfo Chains
May 20, 2020 at 8:32 pm

Thanks for your prompt reply, unfortunately I did a poor job explaining and did not mentioned that the tilting is a frame-by-frame hand drawing, not a transform property I could control with sliders, hence the use of time remap.

So in my case, I don’t see how master properties would do the trick?

Or am I missing something here? (totally possible)

Thanks!
Walter Soyka
May 20, 2020 at 9:37 pm

Use master properties to control the time remapping of the plane tilt independently of the looping propeller:

[image]

14142_planemasterproperties.aep.zip
[project file]

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
Rodolfo Chains
May 20, 2020 at 10:55 pm

Thank you for taking the trouble to build this self explanatory sample project. Pretty detailed and neat too.

Admittedly I was being skimpy with my precomps and had the propeller precomp INSIDE the plane body rotation animation precomp, and this was actually my master precomp, with the time remap.
That setup does not work.

You’ve just made my day!

Thanks for being such a star!!! really mean it!

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