Mask on Pre-comp stops blending modes and adjustment

[CGGZ]

Hello everyone, 

I have a big issue I have been trying to solve. mostly workflow related 

I am doing a 3D animation and editing in AE woith many elements to do post-production on: facade, floor, glass, etc

For a smoother file layout and workflow I don't want thousands of layers with a set matte, so I thought to put all adjustment layers for each element on a precomp and then MASK THE PRECOMP ONLY.

Most of my layers have blending modes such as COLOR DODGE or SOFT LIGHT.

This works with perfectly with COLLAPSE TRANFORMATIONS on, UNTIL I apply the mask to limit those adjustment to the area that I want them in.

At this point I loose all blending modes and adjustments.

Is there any solution you can think of?

[Rick Gerard]

Collapse transformations change the rendering order. If the nested comp has 3D layers and is using the C4D rendering engine, blend modes and effects will go away as soon as you collapse transformations. Without seeing a screenshot of both comps with all modified properties of the layers that are causing problems, and without knowing exactly what your design goal is, it is pretty difficult to figure out a fix. The adjustment layers may have to be moved into pre-comps. We can't know without details. There are too many possibilities. 

[CGGZ]

Hello Rick, 

thank you for your response. It's the first time I look for help in the forum so I apologise for not giving more context and thank you for explaining.

I am quite new to AfterEffects but am very excited to learn more!

I am not working with 3D layers but just jpgs rendered form 3DS max.

Here is a better explanation of my issue that hopefully can give you more insight:

[Rick Gerard]

Your cropped screenshots helped a bit. An expanded flow chart would help more. I see 3 adjustment layers in the Facade Effects comp, all blend modes appear to be normal. There is really no need to have 3 adjustment layers on top of each other, even if all three of them have different masks. 

I don't see any 3D layers and I only see a PNG layer in the Facade Effects comp so the only reason I can think of to collapse transformations in the nested comp would be to use the Color Dodge blend mode in Layer 4.

I see that the nested comp has motion blur applied to the layer but I don't see motion blur on any layer in the Facade Effect comp.  I'm assuming it is animated in the Main comp.

Without knowing more about the structure of your comp I would think that all you need to do to make the project work would be to get rid of the adjustment layers in the Facade Effects comp, stack all of the effects and any masks that may have been in the adjustment layers right in the nested comp and use compositing options with the masks to make the color adjustments you need to the nested comp. 

The only reason to pre-compose or use nested layers, is to group layers and change the rendering order. 

Maybe this tutorial by my friend John Dickenson will give you some ideas. He is a great teacher and he is a master of efficient workflows. 

[video]

I think everybody should take the time to look at John's entire Work Smarter & Faster in After Effects series. It will be well worth your time. 

If you still need help post a screenshot showing all the layers and effects in your nested comp (pre-comp) and show me an expanded flowchart of the comp so I can figure out which mask is not working and why you need to collapse transformations. 

[CGGZ]

Thank you Rick,  

your response was very helpful and helped me a lot.

I realise now that being a Photoshop user the problem was more my mental approach, where I usually stack effects inside a group and mask the group.

In AE it does makes more sense to place multiple effects in one adjustment layer, sometimes our brain is so wired to certain ways of working we miss the easier and more sensible route that is right in front of our eyes

I will be watching your friend's video series for sure as I agree that improving one's workflow is very important and is what I'm trying to to recently.

[RyanScammell]

I have the same problem and frankly, CGGZ, I wouldn't knock yourself for being a photoshop user and feeling like this is confusing.  I work almost exclusively in After Effects and have for over a decade and it doesn't make a ton of sense to me.  Give the attached a look.  Everything is 2D.  Logically you can understand why I might want all the design elements on the left in a precomp.  Why? Because all those elements are repeated on the right.  I'll animate within the precomp which will automatically apply the animation to both sides.  All of the darker color elements in the design require me to use Multiply, but I don't want to Multiply the entire precomp because of the white text.  Hence, collapse transformations as my solve.  That's all well and good until I say, "hey, it might be nice to remove this one piece of text on the right to give me a little space to drop the text in the center down a bit" (see area circled in yellow). However as soon as I do that, the blending modes disappear and it all breaks.  Ok fine, maybe it's just a mask, issue, let's try matteing it instead.  Nope, same problem.  

I can obviously do any number of work arounds to get what I want (I can split the white text out so I can multiply the precomp and get rid of collapse transformations; I can remove that one element and put it in the main comp instead; etc etc).  But it really seems silly that it's too big of an ask to both want to mask a precomp AND keep the blending modes inside.  Just don't quite get the math going on in the background that makes it operate this way.

It's kinda like this one button does like three different things and they should just be separated out -- one button (1) should carry blending modes over from precomps into the main comp; a second button (2) should carry 3D positional information from the precomp into the main comp; and a third button (3) should allow any vector objects in the precomp to continuously rasterize.  

Even after a decade of using AE, I consistently find scenarios where I click this button to solve one problem only to create another.  It's one of the things that I bump against constantly in a software that otherwise I find very easy to use.