Parenting
After Effects offers a technique called parenting that can assist in speeding up
character animation for Flash. This method attaches one or more layers to a
parent layer. If a parent layer moves across the Comp Window, the child layers
follow. With the exception of opacity, any changes made to the parent layer??™s
transform properties are inherited by the child layers. Child layers can have their
own animation, but these do not affect the parent.
Locate the Chapter_07 folder on the DVD. Copy this folder to your hard drive.
The folder contains all the ?¬?les needed to complete the chapter exercises.
Parenting 171
In this ?¬?rst exercise, you will learn how to assign parenting to several layers.
Once the layers are linked together, you will then animate the character and
export the ?¬?nal composition as a Flash SWF ?¬?le. The SWF ?¬?le will be imported
into Flash. To see an example of what you will build, locate and launch the
SuperHero.swf ?¬?le in the Completed folder inside the 01_Parenting folder in
Chapter_07 (Figure 7.2). Welcome to parenthood!
Figure 7.2: The completed character animation uses parenting in After Effects.
Create a new project in 1. Adobe After Effects.
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