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Filed under: Motion Graphics •

Parenting Skills

Parenting is the ability to link one object to another. Once this bond has been established between parent and child, if you move, scale, or rotate the parent, the child is affected in the same way, grouped together as one complex object. A child can still have its own animation; if the parent happens to be animating as well, the child follows it around while it also does its own thing.

In this way, parenting is similar to nesting compositions. Before parenting was introduced in After Effects version 5, the best way to group objects was to place them in their own composition, and then nest this entire comp into a master comp. We could then animate this nested comp as a group, with all of its objects dutifully following along and executing their own animations just as if they had already been pre-rendered as a movie.

Parenting is useful to people who have trouble getting the hang of nesting comps, or who like to keep everything in one comp to more easily coordinate keyframes. Unlike nesting comps, however, applying effects to or altering the opacity of the parent will not affect any of the children. Read on to learn how to set up these chains yourself.

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Setting up these relationships is easy. First, expose the “Parent” column in the Time Controls panel. If not already visible, context-click (right-click on Windows, Control-click on the Mac) on another column such as “Source Name” and select Columns > Parent from the resulting pop-up menu. The shortcut is Shift+F4.

To reveal the Parent column, right-click on any other column header, or press Shift+F4.

Remember that you can re-arrange panels by dragging them left or right; we tend to drag the Parent column to be alongside the Layer/Source name column.

Second, you need to link a child to its prospective parent. There are two tools to do this: a “pick whip” that allows you to drag a pointer from the child to the layer in the same window you wish to be its parent (the first image below), or a pop-up menu where you select the parent by name (the second image below). “None” is also an option, to un-parent a layer.

To parent one layer to another, you can either use the pickwhip tool next to the parent popup (top), or use the popup menu itself (above).

You can link multiple children to one parent. A nifty shortcut for this is to select all the prospective children and then use the pop-up menu for one to select a parent; all the selected layers will get the same parent. A parent can also be linked to another parent (we’ll get to an example of that in a bit).

Parents cast a kind of “reality distortion field” around their children. For example, after linking you could scale a parent to half its size and rotate it 45˚; the child’s numeric parameters won’t change, even though it will now appear half it size and rotated in the Comp window. The flip side of this is you may notice some interesting jumps in the child’s parameters at the time you parent it. For example, if the prospective parent was scaled 50% and the child 100% before you link them, the child’s scale will jump to 200% when you establish the link. (There’s some other stranger side effects we’ll discuss at the end.) Your animation itself will not have changed; After Effects just fudges the child’s keyframe values to keep track of the parent’s transformations.

To unlink a child from a parent, you have two choices. If you just select None from the child’s Parent pop-up, the child will keep all the reality distortions placed on it by its parent at the point in time where you unlinked them.

This can be a handy tool to create new keyframes that are too difficult to calculate in your head: for example, if you like a layer’s animation, but now wish it was doing it offset to the left and rotated 60˚, link it to a parent, offset and rotate the parent, and then unlink it. After Effects will calculate the new keyframe values for you. If this is not what you want, hold down the Option key when you unlink (Alt on Windows), and the child will forget the transformations the parent placed on it.

next page: a sample parenting chain, and a gotcha to watch out for

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