Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects, 5th Edition

18 Nesting Compositions

Creating complex motion graphics that are easy to edit requires building a hierarchy of compositions

This is the first of three chapters that show you how to build a hierarchy of comps. Here, our focus is on creating complex animations that are easy to edit. We also delve further under the hood of After Effects’ rendering order: Understanding how data travels through the hierarchy will help you trouble-shoot if the result is not exactly what you expected…

This chapter includes many examples showing you the benefits of nesting 2D comps; the following chapter will cover Precomposing (sort of like nesting backward). If you are nesting comps with 3D layers, check out Chapter 20, Collapsing Transformations, which covers specific ...