SWF and After Effects, Sliders, AND DuIK Part 2

So, Now, for some reason, I am having issues rendering the SWF's in my After Effects program.

What the....?!?!

I did some research, and looked at some forum posts, and I even tested it out on another computer with Ae CS4 (which ended up working just fine). The only thing I can think of is that a plug-in I have is screwing up the rendering of SWF files.

SO... I am going to try and recreate the puppet with FXG files.
Yay.

SO, I put all the body parts in frame one of the Flash timeline, and exported a FXG. I then imported it into Adobe Illustrator.  I bypassed the issues I had before with body parts disappearing by making sure everything was broken up and (important) the vectors were colored with a color number, not a bitmap swatch (which I had done before to make it easier to universally change colors in Flash.)

I imported it into After Effects.  To recap:

Import as Composition.  This will give you halfway manageable rotation points.

NICE!

If you choose Composition-Retain Layer Sizes, each symbol will be the size of the stage.

Don't do it. It'll still work, but blah.

SO, now I have to redo all the rotation points, then redo the precomps for the hands, do a Time Remap for the hands, Import the head, and BAM! Back up to speed.

Quick Tip: The quick way to change the rotation point is to use the "Pan Behind (Anchor Point) tool (keyboard shortcut Y).

When you do that, you can just drag the rotation (anchor) point wherever you want!

Like so...

One thing I noticed after I had to rebuild all the sliders; I had imported the feet and hands in a composition that was set to 12fps; maybe it set its own frame rate to the head flash movie that I used to make the lip sync in flash.

Anyway, it was messing things up a bit, so I had to make sure all the frame rates matched and I had to redo my hand (and feet) comps to be true 29.97 fps.

I also only made one hand and one foot comp, and duplicated them on the stage, swapping them when needed.

Next: the Reckoning!