Complex nesting issues: Losing resolution

Question

I am on a short suspense time and ripping my hair out about this one... The short of it is I have made a comic book that animates pages turning and is also camera tracked to a video with camera movement. In the main comp I have animated the book to zoom in around the comic cells, however the vectors are very blury. I have dug through a ton of posts and attempted some of the fixes but have come across a few "you can't mix these types of operations" situations.

I first located where the resolution breakdown has occured, and it is when all the individual pages are comped together in order to animate the book pages turning. The book pages are 3D layers in order to animate them turning. If I turn on continuously rasterize it breaks the camera and animation, which I have found, is an expected side effect of collapse transform/continuosly rasterize. So what the heck do you suggest? From everything I have gathered, what I am attempting cannot be accomplished by After Effects in one large comp with nested comps? Would any of this be an issue if I just had everything un-nested in the main comp? Outside the box work-arounds welcomed... I am running out of time and my family needs to eat.

Rick Gerard · Answer

A flow chart* of your comp with the layers and effects revealed would help us help you.

If you have 3D layers in a comp that is nested in your Main comp and a camera in the main comp, the 3D layers will take their transform properties from their original location instead of the position of the nested comp. If you have 3D layers in a Book Comp, and you make that Book Comp layer 3D, and you collapse transformations, the position, rotation, and scale of the Book Comp are no longer used. When you do camera tracking, then tie other 3D layers to the Track Solids you added you change their position, but when you collapse transformations, the position of the 3D layers in the nested Book Comp revert to their original position. Did you follow that?

The fix is to add a null to the Book Comp, then tie the Position, Orientation, Rotation for X, Y, and Z, and the Scale of the null to the same properties on the book layer in your main comp. It's pretty easy to do if you separate the comp panels like this:

You don't even have to use the Pickwhip. Just drag a selection around the nested Book Comp's Position, Scale, Orientation, Rotation X, Y, and Z properties and press Alt/Option + Ctrl/Cmnd + C or use the Edit/Copy with Property Links menu and then select the Null and Paste.

The only problem you have with this workflow happens if you need to do some more animating on the 3D layers in the nested comp because they could end up way out of position and even out of the comp frame. The fix is to temporarily reset the position of the nested comp (the book) comp in the main comp to comp center. You can do that by leaving the Camera Track solid (I never use nulls because you can't see them so it is hard to check the accuracy of the track) as a guide layer, then temporarily Shift + Parenting the reset Book comp layer to the Camera Track solid to move the layer back into position.

That should fix your problem. Let me know if you have any other problems.

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