[Sergio Pol]

Never mind, I just realized it’s not the secondary animation but the markers that are causing it. Still don’t know why since there are some frames between the end of the animation and the start of the “out” action its subsequent marker.

[Sergio Pol]

Hello again Tom, I ran into the same thing again but this time I think I found the culprit of all my problems. I’ve been working on a series of character animations. Every piece is unique but some scenes are reused from previous projects. At first I created, duplicated lots of AI files and comps inside AE depending on my needs still trying to be as tidy as possible. Needless to say I have a big mess on my hands after 2 chapters of the series. So I found that having duplicate comps with the same name “maleMouth” for example makes the expression unresponsive. That along with all the previous causes I pointed should be the reasons why I’m having the issue.

PD. I tried your tip on refreshing markers from original source but it always deletes all my markers on that layer. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

[Sergio Pol]

Hi Tom, no I didn’t know of that and of course it helps for future projects. As I told you I use this expression a lot. I guess in the end this has to do with the expression sort of being burned into the layer and the cache. After a few previews it kind of fixes the state of the markers and the expression in the memory so any editing made is not taken into account. I’ll keep an eye on the issue as I’m sure I’ll face it again eventually and update this post with the new findings. Thanks a lot for your help and willingness to help.

[Sergio Pol]

Update:
I think I found how to make it work. I purge all memory and then throw a new copy of the precomp inside the head comp, apply timeremapping and expression.

It sure is a pain in the back so if anyone has a better more practical solution please tell me.

note:
I tried with the memory purge because after trying changing the marker labels inside the precomp I still got it to respond to the old labels in the head comp. For example, my original marker labels inside the mouth precomp were: “simplieSmile” and “bigSmile” and I changed them to “smile” and “big”. When I tried to call them from the head comp with the new names it didn’t find them but using their old labels in the head comp triggered the animation.

[Sergio Pol]

Well it happened again. This time with the mouth precomp. I tried the same solution I did before but it isn’t working. I’m adding screenshots this time to better explain the issue.

Here are the 3 states inside the mouth precomp

Here’s what happens in the head comp

As shown the marker “mm” on the mouth comp is not found. It’s checked against other labels so I know it’s not a typo kind of error.

[Sergio Pol]

Hi Tomas, thanks for taking time to help me. This is silly, I kept trying solutions and among the many things I did I threw a new “eyes” comp into my head composition, applied the time remapping and the corresponding expression and it worked. Now I can’t replicate the error. The only difference between the “eyes” comp I had in my head comp is that the old one was parented to a null and the new isn’t.

I’ll try to explain the error in more detail since I think it’s possible I run into it again. Imagine you have a “head” comp where you have “eyes” and “mouth” precomps. Imagine you set states for the eyes open, for blinking and for looking to the front and when calling them from the head comp it works fine. But days later you try to add a squint state. You go to illustrator, create the state and then import it into AE, place it on your “eyes” precomp, assign a marker for it but when calling it from the head comp it just won’t find the new marker inside the “eyes” comp. It sends the header to keyframe 0 on the “eyes” comp.

I hope this explains it.

[Sergio Pol]

Thanks a lot Filip. I ended up using the script “Create nulls from paths extended” that adds a lot of funcionalities to the basic version that comes with AE. Your info is still useful and I apprectiate you take your time to anwser my question.

[Sergio Pol]

Thanks for your input Kalleheikki. I was afraid of this so I continued working with the less automatized method like the one you suggested. This brings confirmation to my assumptions however so your answer is much appreciated.

[Sergio Pol]

Yes I’m sorry I figured out I missed key information here. To rotate the flare I used the orbit tool from videocopilot which creates a 3D null in the scene makes it rotate and then I attached the flare position XY to the null. The speed is then controlled by a slider. I have the slider set to 30 at the beginning then go up to 300 at 30 secs and stay there. I hope this explains it better, thanks!

[Sergio Pol]

Ok Dan thanks again.