wiggle effect not parenting to other file

[Gary Hazen]

To clarify, are you using the wiggler or a wiggle expression?

The wiggle expression is sort of like a random number generator. When you duplicate a layer the wiggle pattern for each layer is unique.

The wiggler generates keyframes. If you duplicate a layer that has keyframes applied from the wiggler the movements should match exactly.

[David Payne]

hi thanks for the reply.

i used ‘wiggle – position’ from the effects menu.

I have had a look for keyframes to copy and paste to the other layer but it seems it is an expression to generate random numbers like you said.
On the expression line it says:

wiggle(effect(“wiggle – position”)(“wiggle speed (wigs/sec)”), effect(“wiggle – position”)(Wiggle Amount (pixels)”))

[Todd Kopriva]

You have used an animation preset (specifically, a behavior animation preset), not an effect.

If you want to generate keyframes that represent motion originally created by an expression, you can use the Convert Expression To Keyframes keyframe assistant.

But I’d probably just stick with parenting the window to the house or precomposing them together and animating the precomposition layer.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[David Payne]

hi, thanks for your reply.
the problem is i have already parented the 2 or 3 window layers to the house, however they wiggle in different ways to the house…

Could you explain how to precompose them together and output accordingly? That sounds helpful..

[Todd Kopriva]

Precomposing is a fundamental part of using After Effects. If you’re not familiar with it, then I recommend reading at least the first few sections of the “Nesting, precomposing, and prerendering” part of After Effects Help.

But, basically, you select the layers that you want to precompose together (put into a single nested composition) and then press Ctrl+Shift+C (Windows) or Command+Shift+C (Mac OS). Then you have a single layer (a precomposition layer) that has a composition as its source. You can animate this one layer, and all of the things in the nested composition come along for the ride, just like they were part of one video footage item. You could, therefore, precompose the house and all of its windows together and then wiggle the precomposition to have the whole system wiggle together.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[David Payne]

that sounds great, as long as the exported composition doesn’t “flatten” to lose things like photoshop opacity etc then I think this will be the sollution… thanks a lot.

David

[David Payne]

I have tried this and seem to have the problem I thought might happen.. the composition that I have exported seems ‘flattened’.

Basically I want a layer showing the house the other layer showing the duplicate window frame. I then want to put a layer of say a person in between the other two layers, to create the image that the person is behind the window frame but still slightly visible. I then want to apply a wiggle to all of this to give a realistic camera shake.

Am I right in saying that if I pre-compose as you suggested I can not then ‘split’ the composition into the 2 layers to insert the person between them?

Many thanks

[David Payne]

ok i’ll go at this a different way, is there any way to get a realistic camera shake effect that can be applied to a layer and would then also be applied to layers that are parented to it?

[David Chapman]

Hi –

I know this is a very old thread, but for those who search for ‘parenting’ and ‘wiggler’ and this pops up, I thought I’d just add a little extra too…

I’ve discovered that if a layer is set to ‘orient towards camera’ and your wiggle expression is on the orientation of a 3D layer, then anything parented to it won’t follow the same orientation.

Once ‘auto-orient’ is switched back to off, the parenting seems to work.

I know this is quite a specific example, but it may help someone!

DC