[Claire Presnall]

Thanks Graham! You described exactly what it felt like was happening, but WHYYYYYYY!!!!! All I can say is “Adobe gotta Adobe” (sad trombone). 🤷‍♀️

Thanks for taking the time to investigate. Good to know I haven’t completely lost my mind. And thanks for the script! Still baffled why it suddenly started misbehaving after years of acting right. Maybe this is one of those Adobe wants me to switch to 2025 and is slowly breaking 2024 like they do sometimes.

Have a great rest of your week!

[Claire Presnall]

Hi Graham! Here’s a project with my solids. I have the comp with the distribute all wonky. I also created a 1/8 width precomp where I did the math and hand spaced my solids evenly like I’d like them to be, then dropped that into a fresh 100% width comp and lined those up so you can see what I’m going for.

Luckily, yesterday they changed the art so this hand-spaced precomp solution should work for me to meet my deadline (hurray), but I would LOVE to figure out what is going on so I can fix it next time.

Thanks for taking a look!

Distribute-Broken.aep 736 KB After Effects Project Files - Click to view

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[Claire Presnall]

Thanks! That looks like it does exactly what I need!

[Claire Presnall]

I’ll try and clean a project file up to share after I get these other more cooperative jobs on my list done. Thanks!

[Claire Presnall]

Thanks for the suggestion, but these are individual solid layers created by ctrl+y inside the precomps for the offending layers to make sure they’re the size I want then drug into a fresh comp. The anchor points on all layers are centered to the individual layer. The layers are stacked in the order I want them to appear left at the bottom to right at the top of the comp layer stack. This is how I usually get the results I want, and I’m not sure why it’s treating the green solids as if they’re the same width as the pink ones.

Honestly, it’s kind of like it’s equal spacing the blue then spacing the green & pink between them which is how we end up with the green getting enough space to replace it with a pink solid. However, if I delete all the blue layers, we still end up with the same spacing distribution.

[Claire Presnall]

Hi Mathieu. It’s been a bit since I had an issue that required logging into the Cow, so Im just now seeing your response. I had given up and just started building repeating backgrounds in AE using shape layers and the repeater tool (what a pain!), but I’m going to have to try your solve next time I get this issue. Thanks!

[Claire Presnall]

So after about a year of not having this issue, it’s back on 2 of 4 files from a new designer. I tried Joe’s fix of copy/paste to a new doc. Of course, this doc has 4 art boards, so that complicated things a bit. I wanted to make sure that my art boards were lined up perfectly with the provided art. Luckily, this art included background rectangles. SO the steps were:

Copy and paste my already beautifully organized file (making sure every layer has a unique name) into a blank file.

Duplicate all of the background rectangles and put them each onto their own individual layers.

Highlight these new rectangle layers and choose “convert to artboards” (Object > Artboards – which is near the very bottom of the menu).

Delete the new empty layers where my rectangles used to exist but are no more.

Cross my fingers as I save the multi-artboard file then save it to individual files for each art board.

Bring it into AE.

Send praise to Joe for his simple fix that is ridiculous in its necessity. THANK YOU JOE!!

So much easier than adjusting the art boards by adding a 0 then scaling everything and making sure nothing is overlapping onto the neighboring art boards and blah blah blah, you get the point. It was going to be a pain!

[Claire Presnall]

11 years later, and this was EXACTLY what I needed! Thanks!!!

[Claire Presnall]

Thanks for the suggestions, but sadly, they didn’t fix the issue.

My current solution is turning their pattern layers solid, creating the dot pattern in AE, using the AI layer as a mask and parent. It’s inelegant and creates an 2 extra layers for every object (rather than a single layer, I have the outline, the fill mask, and the AE pattern).

I would LOVE to know how to fix this. I thought I’d fixed it as a 4×8 pattern set to brick offset seems to work okay, but those dots are spaced too far apart for today’s animation.

[Claire Presnall]

Hi! Thanks for the thoughts, but sadly, I tried all of those before posting my initial question.

It seems to be an issue folks randomly have per the adobe message boards, and so far, no one has figured out why it’s happening. And it’s so inconsistent! I’ll get multiple artboards in a single file that I send to individual files, so you’d think they’d all have the same settings. Some are wonky, and some import just fine.

So it’s brute force scaling up in AI to 10x my size for me. 😢