Is the + needed in PS and AI anymore?

[One Demented Man]

I've been folowing Okay's, Creating an Illustrator Puppet tutorial. First let me say, that it is very good and gives a lot of valuable insights along the way.

However, I have a quick question about the need for +.

I noticed that both in AI and PS files, there are no added +. I was always under the impression that this were needed to give independence. Has this changed?

I also noted that sometimes, the crown does not show in the Rig mode, when going back and forth to AI. However, sometimes everything seems fine when checking it out in Record mode. Is this just a cliche?

[alank99101739]

I have not looked at the video, but the "+" is a helper. It automatically adds independence when you load up artwork. But you can add it by hand by clicking on the crown yourself. Since I reimport artwork sometimes, I try to do as much as possible with the automatic tagging so I recommend including the +, but you can certainly just do it by hand.

When you edit artwork and ch notices the changes, sometimes the autotagged picks up the changes and adds additional tags. But I am not sure what rules it follows if a + is added half way. Sometimes layer name changes lose all manually rigging under that layer, so I try to get independence and auto tagging right from the beginning to avoid layer renaming later and losing manual work.