Turning on and off layers within a duplicated comp without effecting the original comp.

[Anders Hattne]

I have a bit of a problem understanding. But couldn’t you add an expression to the opacity?

Put a control layer with a checkbox control or just link the it’s opacity? Inverting the opacity for layers that should be seen in Off mode?
…or is it more complicated than that

http://www.ardillamedia.com

[David Gabriel]

Thanks for your reply.
Yeah I don’t think I explained it too well.
Have a look at the image I posted with the bit that says ‘this is how I want it to look’.
To put it simply when the animated head is in the inner cone area (the light illustration) I want to be able to see the whole head. When it is out of the cone area I want to just see the eyes. These heads will be moving so they will be moving in and out of the ‘light’ (the cone area) with the head disappearing and reappearing.

I figured that if I had two of the exact same comps contains the animated heads and put the cone light illustration between the two comps that hopefully there would be someway to get rid of the rest of the head on the top comp (leaving just the eyes).

Because it is the exact same comp I am not sure if this is possible.

Does that make more sense?

Thanks again.

David.

[David Gabriel]

By the way, I do get what you mean by creating an expression for opacity and controlling that but I have the exact same comp twice in my main comp. I want to make the head invisible in one comp whilst keeping it visible in the other.
I personally don’t think it is possible to do this but I guess I am also just searching for ways to leave the eyes only when the head leaves the ‘light’ area of my comp.

[Michael Szalapski]

Make two comps. Turn off all but the eyes in one comp (if you labeled your layers well, this won’t take too long). Then use a track matte to reveal the one with the heads visible.

If you have to change the animation of the heads, simply copy and paste the new layers into the second comp and turn the heads off again.

Alternatively, use the copy with property links command so that any changes in one comp are reflected in the other. This will create a large number of expressions though and (depending on your computer) may slow it down a bit.

– 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.

[David Gabriel]

Hi Michael,
Thanks for the reply. Having two comps and then just deactivating the head (leaving the eyes only) in the top comp is definitely the way I think I will have to go. Now I have another problem where I have the eyes blinking from time to using shapes which are the same colour as the head for the eyelids.
I will have to track matte the eyelid / eyeballs instead but the problem with that is that the eyelids are in four different layers (top right, top left, lower right, lower left) which means I can’t do a straight track matte in the comp.
I am going to have to create a sub comp with just the animated eyelids so I can use it as a track matte. With over 20 characters with different skin tones this is getting extremely complicated!

[Anders Hattne]

It seems you have arrived at a valid solution, duplicating comps.
May I recommend a script which has helped out with complex compositions: “True Comp duplicator”

Duplicates compositions, its containing precomps and updates containing expressions!

http://www.ardillamedia.com