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Process Advice - Multiple Instances of Characters

Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2016 3:09 pm
by SandyBD
First off, DUIK is an awesome tool, love using it!
So I'm doing an animation where there characters are on screen talking for a few sentences, then they go off screen, and then pop back on multiple times over the course of the animation. I'm wondering the best way to approach animating this; should I pre-comp each character for the entire duration of the sound file, or should I animate the times they're on screen as individual pre-comps?
Just wondering if anyone has any experience/advice/hard-won knowledge they'd like to share about this... ;)

Cheers!

Re: Process Advice - Multiple Instances of Characters

Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2016 5:46 pm
by Duduf
Hi!

I don't think there's an option better than the other, it depends on your own habits with AE... Maybe if the sound file is very long, it could be easier to animate on separate precomps, in case you have to come back working on some animations, it will be easier to find the times you need, and to re-render only corrected animations.

If you use proxies too, I think that having multiple precomps make it easier to render and keep proxies up-to-date.

But you need to be careful with composition names if you have expressions working with values outside of the precomps, this could become a real pain if some comps have the same name and you don't notice it soon enough ;)

Re: Process Advice - Multiple Instances of Characters

Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2016 10:06 pm
by SandyBD
Great point about the names, I can see that causing huge headaches if you have multiple pre-comps of the same characters. I think I'll stick with a single pre-comp for now and see how it goes.
Thanks!