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Opacity in After Effects pre-compositions
When you have a vector pre-composition and want to change the opacity of that composition, you’ll notice that After Effects will change the opacity of the layers inside of that composition individually, instead of the whole composition as one layer. This has frustrated me a lot in the past years of using After Effects with vector layers. I couldn’t even find a solution online. Until, by accident, I have managed to find a solution myself while I was working on an animation project. Below an example of what the problem looks like.
Why does this happen?
The cause of this problem is that the vector option is meant for use on layers, not compositions. You can use it on a composition, but then it enables “Collapse transformations”. When you pre-compose layers, After Effects will look at this composition as one individual layer. When you enable “Collapse transformations”, After Effects will actually look inside the composition and treat each layer inside of it as its own individual layer. This causes the pre-composition to show all of the layers opacity individually instead of one whole layer.
How to solve the problem
If you don’t need vector you can just disable this option and your problem is solved. But what if you do want to keep your composition as a vector layer and still have it act as one layer? For example when you want to change the opacity. Well lucky enough this has a very easy solution. All you have to do is follow the steps below.
Step 1: Create a solid with the same size as the composition in which the pre-composition is located. If your pre-composition is 1920×1080, then make the solid 1920×1080 as well.
Step 2: Make sure this solid is located above the pre-composition which you are having this problem with.
Step 3: Set the track matte of the pre-composition to “Alpha Matte” so that the pre-composition is using the solid layer above as an alpha mask. If you don’t see the track matte options, make sure you switch to your track matte mode by clicking the “Toggle switches / modes”.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy
And that’s it! For some reason your pre-composition is now seen as one layer when you change the opacity, and you can keep your layers vector. I hope this helped you out. If you have any questions about this problem, or have a different problem, let me know in the comment below and I’ll respond as quickly as possible! 🙂
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