Scale composition with AE script doesn't affect my character rigging with Duik Bassel

Report · Feb 16, 2021

I made a complex animation in a composition that's 1000px x 1000px with 60fps and I need to have it on 800px x 800px with 30fps. I scaled the composition with the AE script and it worked fine for the background and other animations I did but the character I rigged with Duik Bassel 2 didn't scale down. My Body limbs don't work fine and the fps change doubled the speed of my animation. It's very complex and I'm kinda lost thx for the help

Report · Feb 16, 2021

DUIK itself is very complex and uses expressions heavily. I'm not sure how this "scale down" script is working, but it looks like that it just take the scale and position of a layer, ignoring the values which are generated by an expression or the expression itself.

In other words: to make this work, you'll need to scale down the rig and the layers, not just the layers.

Once created, scaling down a rig is very hard with DUIK, as fas as I know.

A better approach might be this:

Create a comp of the size and fps you need, put your oversized comp into it and scale it until it fits. Don't activate CR. Since you are scaling down, there shouldn't appear any quality loss. Timing should be constant, because you just skip every second frame.

You can use the same approch and just scale the comp with your DUIK rig.

*Martin

Report · Feb 16, 2021

Hi Martin

Many thanks to your answer, it helped me much.

I did following things to make it work:

1) Pre-composed all the layers that belonged to my character rig. After this, I was able to transform it without losing my Rig.

2) With the Scale composition script I could scale my whole comp to 800px down, included my rig that now is a pre-comp.

3) I made a new Project with the needed settings (30fps, 800px x 800px).

4) I imported my composition to my new project and it fitted directly because I already scaled it down to 800px with the AE script.

5) For the 60fps to 30fps, it was almost double speed. I could fix this last issue with a right click on my layer and then hit "time" => "time stretch". I stretched it with a stretch factor of 170. In the end, i had to try out with the stretch factor: Firstly I tried 200 because I thought it was double speed, but it apparentally wasn't exactly double speed. After the stretch with 200, it was way too slow, so I tried out different factors until I was happy with the speed.

Again, thank you very much 🙂

Report · Feb 17, 2021

You did great!

However, I don't understand the fps-issue. If you create a new comp with a different fps, and you put your old comp into it, AE just skips or repeats frames. The length of the comp and timing are consitent.

If it works - okay. But this isn't the normal workflow. Maybe you can spend some time investigating this.

*Martin