Duplicating Rig Comp breaks links

[joechung76]

Hello,

I've created a rig and it works perfect. The problem is my team's workflow consists of saving each animation as a comp. We use to do this by duplicating the rig comp, renaming it "henryRig_walkCycle", so on. The problem is that using the connector from duik the expression is pointing to a specific layer and is not dynamic. It does not change with the newly duplicated comp with the new name, it points to the original comp in the original rig comp.

example
//Duik.connector
var ctrlLayer = comp("henryRig_fv_v03").layer("eye_cntrl");
var ctrlValue = ctrlLayer.effect("eye_expression")(1);

now if you don't duplicate and you just rename the rig comp "henryRig_fv_v03" to any other name then after effects knows to update the code with the name. It's only if you duplicate the rig that it does not update to the new name but points to the existing comp in the original rig.

I hope I am making sense. Is there any way around this? We would like to save separate animations in the same project file by using multiple rig comps.

This mostly breaks with face rig, hand slider, etc. Anything that is buried within several comps since it needs to link to an outer comp.

[Duduf]

Hi,

Yes unfortunately this issue with expressions in Ae is a real pain... BUT the awesome Lloyd Alvarez made a script for this True Comp Duplicator will duplicate a comp AND its nested precomps AND update the expressions!