Parenting shape layers warps shape perspective? NO KEYFRAMES CC2017

[hqhempen]

So I've come across a really weird issue I've never seen before. I have a sock shape layer, and a shoe shape layer, both on completely different shape layers in my timeilne. The anchor points in these are different so as to allow rotation at natural points when I parent them up. Here's a pic before parenting the shoe to the sock layer.

And here's what happens AFTER I pickwhip / parent the shoe to the sock.

Call me crazy but I'm pretty sure parenting is NOT supposed to warp the perspective of the child object. The layers aren't 3D enabled, in new default After Effects project, tried copying shape layers into new comp, active camera view, absolutely NO keyframes for animation even added yet, and no effects added.

I tried looking in the General section for preferences but can't find a tick box for anything similar to a weird feature like this. Only thing I can assume is moving the anchor point affect the perspective, but that absolutely shouldn't matter or affect the perspective of the shape. Anyone have this issue? In CC2017 on Windows 7, nothing unusual happening except for this.

[angie_taylor]

Try holding down the alt key when you parent it. What happens then?

Also, to know more about your comp, We need to seethe switchescolumn and any adjusted properties in your screenshot. Select all layers and go to Animation > Reveal all modified properties and then take another screenshot please.

[hqhempen]

Holding alt while parenting sends the shoe off into space way below the composition:

[OussK · Accepted solution]

By Default After effects work like this, so there is nothing wrong, so to fix that you have 2 option, you can create null object and parent both layer to the null object or you can do the transformation you want on the shape transform and not the layer transform, and here i'm talking about scale transform, so instead of setting the scale of "Sock" to [-75.4,173.7], keep it at 100% for both value and change the scale from "Transform: Rectangle 1", so try this and let us know.

[hqhempen]

Well, I've parented a a lot of layers in After Effects and never have witnessed this feature before. Resetting Sock to 100% scale and transforming the scale under the shape attributes itself fixed the problem. So in essence I guess After Effects looks at the transform scale of a layer and for some reason decides to "warp" the child object to match said scale? Guess I've never messed with the scale of most parented shape layers to begin with.

[angie_taylor]

Thanks for the screenshots, that really helps 🙂

layers always animate relative to their Parents. When you parent one layer to another, its values become relative to the parent instead of relative to the composition. By default, when you parent one object to another, it stays in the same place in the composition and does not appear to change at the time of parenting. There is one special case, however, where the child will be forced to change when it is parented.

It only really happens when there's been a non-uniform Scale performed, that's what causes the "skew" effect. This is because

there is no direct transform that can be applied to the other object to compensate for this type of non-uniform scaling.

In your case it's because the sock is Scaled non-uniformly I suspect.

The solution suggested by OussK will work, using a Null to remove the direct link. Or you can precompose before parenting.