Child won't follow replaced parent

Report · Apr 06, 2019

Hi.

I have created an animation consisting of a floating parent layer, and a bunch of smaller child layers that are meant to follow the floating motion of the parent.

I recently modified the parent layer and had to replace it, but once I did, I realised the bunch of child layers do not follow the replaced parent, even though I had made sure they are still parented.

This makes me think I need to delete the bunch of child layers, and restart the composition all over again, which I don't quite have the time for.

Can anyone please suggest me a more convenient way how to make the child layers follow up with the parent replacement?

Cheers x

Report · Apr 07, 2019

Please make a screenshot of your comp - we need to see the parenting, modified properties, expressions.

As a workaround you've could just add the new parent, without replacing the old one. Parent the new to the old and switch of the old one. Not the cleanest way, but when in a rush, the best without messing around.

*Martin

Report · Apr 08, 2019

Hi Martin,

Thanks for your reply!

I managed to find a quick enough solution to solve this, but if you have any other suggestions that may help in the future, please do share.

Here is a screen grab of my composition anyway:

^ The parent is the floating island, including the two owls.

The children are the little moths on the left side.

The modification in the parent was the change of owl size.

Both parent and children have their own floating motion, but when linked together, the children would still float in the same spot.This was a bit strange, as it hadn't happened before with similar projects.

As I didn't want to rewamp the bunch of children layers, I rendered them all as one separate composition, and then created a whole new composition out of the parent and the united children. And I just realised, in order to make the two layers follow each other, I had to add the same floating settings to the united children's layer, which would then align the motion of both layers.

I did not have to do this before...

Oh, the workaround sounds reasonable, but I already had removed the previous parent version.

Let me know if there's anything else that comes to your mind that I could have done.

Cheers xx

Report · Apr 09, 2019

Unfortunately you don't show the altered properties, so I can only guess.

I see a lot of *.movs in the screenshot and didn't quiet understand your workaround. If you rendered the motion into a video file, import the video file and parent the videos to each other, nothing is following anything, because the video-layer isn't moving. How will AE know, what to move where, if it hasn't access to keyframes and position data?

But your initial workflow sounds right. You take the land with the owls, add keyframes to create the floating motion - expressions should work, too - and connect the moths to the land-layer. Moth will follow the motion of the parent. If they have their own motion, it could be that they stay in place, because both motions cancel each other out. Also, if the motion of the parent is very subtile and slow, you won't see it if you combine it with a faster, agile motion of the moths.

To resolve the issue for you, I suggest creating a new comp, add a square and 4 small circles. Add motion, make the parenting and if this is not working, make a video please (the best would be a video of creating the thing).

I'm doing such this stuff on every project and never run into any issue.

*Martin