New for After Effects, compCode brings tears down Ae projects and rebuilds them at will. The Action engine in Photoshop might be that one thing that people have wanted elsewhere among Adobe products. Although from the same company, not many features proliferate into all of the Creative Cloud products. Perhaps it’s logistic, perhaps each team exists in a bubble. For After Effects, it would make sense to have something that was Photoshop “action” oriented.
Thankfully there are developers like Tomas Sinkunas (RenderTom) who don’t live in a bubble when it comes to developing amazingly powerful and useful tools for work. His latest, CompCode, is a tool for After Effects that will allow you to easily package any Ae project into sharable After Effects scripts. These scripts can then “rebuild” the comp, exactly as it was on another system.
CompCode is being touted for template builders, but I can see greater uses as an internal development tool amongst teams. The After Effects tool lets you specify what the end user can modify when they run the script. The end user can grab what they need from the template, rather than having to import a really large project.
CompCode features, for AE template Building:
- The user chooses what they need from your template, instead of having to import a huge AEP with hundreds of elements when they only need a few;
- No more duplicate items in the end users project. All existing project items can be reused;
- Search option is built into the tool;
- Your template is backwards compatible to CS6. With some additional adjustments, it can be compatible with even CS3;
- You choose to either create a new composition for your design or target currently active one;
- Your branding and information about the template are available in the toolkit.
I can see CompCode being more versatile than just After Effects template builders. Visit aescripts + aeplugins for more details on CompCode, and the demo toolkit.
