After Effects align 2 objetcs, one staying static

[MF@CH]

Hello everybody, this is my first question 🙂

So I have 2 objects: A and B. I wanna align B to the center of A, but without moving A. Pretty simple but how can I do that ? Because all I can get is B moving and A moving too, halfway to get them aligned..

I hope this is clear, I was very surprised but I didn't find the solution yet..

Thanx in advance to everybody who can reply.
Matei

[Mylenium]

It's not realyl clear what kind of alignment you are looking for. Could be as easy as simply dialing in the position values/ copy & pasting them or could be more complicated and require some expressions or whatever. Eitehr way. You need to explain better. A screenshot might hugely help to clarify matters...

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard]

Make sure that the Parent/Link column is visible in the timeline by pressing Shift + F4. Select layer B, hold down the Shift key, and select Layer A as the parent. Layer A will snap to the same position, orientation, and scale as layer A. Both anchor points will be in the same position. As long as parenting is in place layer B will follow layer A, but you will still be able to animate the position, scale, and rotation properties of layer B independently. You can also cancel the parenting and layer B will remain in the same position. 

The Align panel is useless for what you want to do, use parenting, or as Mylenium said, copy and paste the position property.

[MF@CH]

Hello Rick,

Thanx for this solution. First I must say I'm using Adobe After Effects CS6.

Then, the problem is that this doesn't only change the alignment but also the size of Layer B, which has a new vertical size, although even weirder, nothing changes in the visible properties (the ones under "Transform" label"). Don't know if that changes something but layer A is a rectangle (shape layer) and layer B is a text layer and both have their anchor points in their middle.

Any idea of why this happens that way?

[Rick Gerard]

Shift + Parent will match position, scale, and rotation. If you want to go back to the original scale and/or rotation properties of the child layer release the parent after the child layer has moved. If you have scaled or rotated the B layer then you'll have to either enter the current values as an expression or remember them and set them again.

[MF@CH]

Hi Rick, thanx for your answer, although I'm a bit confused: if I do what you say, as soon as I set the parent, B moves. Which means anchor points of A and B get the same, which is fine. But also, size of B changes, which isn't what I want. Releasing the parent, doens't make any change. Did I miss something? Did you mean that I should first write down B size before parenting, then after parenting and moving B, manually restoring B size to what has been written down before the parenting operation?

[Rick Gerard]

After you release the parent you have to reset the scale of B to the original setting. It's not automatic. If your scale is set to 100% before you Shift + parent, just right-click and reset the scale. If the scale is something else like 50, 75 then you can add this expression to the Scale property before you Shift + Parent, and everything will snap back to the original scale when you release the parenting. 

[50, 75]

I hope that clears things up for you.