Designing with PreComps!

Tony, you have nailed it on the head.

Using a Pre-Comp to create textures that you can experiment with is one of the big time-saving benefits about working inside of AE. It also is very liberating from a design perspective, since you can try out ideas without wasting a lot of time just to see what they will look like. (As well as fine tuning your maps by nudging like you said.)

Once you get the idea of how to use a Pre-Comp you will find many other uses. Here's a couple . . .

- When you want to branch off on an idea, but don't want to loose your current work, you can duplicate the current PreComp and use the duplicate for the layer map. This way you can flip back and forth between old and new Pre-Comps just by changing which Pre-Comp is used as the Layer Map.

- You can create animated Layer Maps. Do the animation of your elements in the Pre-Comp and then apply the Pre-Comp as your layer map. This is especially useful when you need things to line up in specific ways. By adjusting the position or timing of the elements on the Pre-Comp you will change how they appear in the final texture map.

Pre-Comps RULE ! ! !

-Zax