But first: I did a podcast
I had a great time sitting down with Jack to talk recently about this work and what it means to think about designers as users. I only listen to a handful of podcasts and this one is genuinely great if you are interested in how motion sits within tech and products.
Listen or watch wherever you do podcast stuff (Spotify, Overcast, Apple).
Overlord 2 comes with a pretty powerful grouping system for precomping and decomping groups of layers. It was designed to work with group parent layers built by Overlord and will automatically trim the new precomp to the size of the group layer.
It has also been possible to precomp selected layers with the Precomp button, but the new comp would stay the same size as your primary comp (like the native precompose behavior). This is still a lot easier than remembering the shortcut (ctrl/⌘+⇧+C ) and clicking through a popup, but how great would it be to automatically trim when you precomped selected layers?
New in Overlord 2.5.0, precomping selected layers now trims to the layer bounds.
Feature simplicity
Simple is rarely easy. Simple usually takes a lot of work to find. Once a simple solution has been located, it usually feels obvious. This is what draws me to the elegance of simplicity in this work.
Simplicity can take the form of an expected outcome.
I have always imagined the Precomp/Decomp buttons to feel like collapsing a groups of layers in other design apps. Since this is not possible in Ae, we use precomps. Until now, the Precomp button had 2 possible outputs (trimmed precomp or matching comp size precomp) based on what you had selected. These differences becomes obvious the more you use Overlord, but with two possible outputs you always have a brief moment of dissonance trying to understand why the output isn't the same. Eliminate this dissonance is an ongoing challenge to find better ways to stay in the flow of work.
While searching for a multi-layer-bounding-box solution I wrote with an expression that is applied, and then measured by the scripting portion of Overlord (because this kind of comp measuring is not possible with scripting). I don't think the expression is all that useful in production but it did make this trimming mechanic possible.
And sometimes the byproducts of bad math can be interesting ↓
ICYMI: Rasterize selections from Ai/Figma
Overlord 2.5.0 can now rasterize selected shapes as a 2x sized PNG and import into Ae just like any other layer.
Breaking with the legacy of no external files, but moving into the future of these jobs are crazy and we need all the help we can get, Overlord can now transfer anything you select in Figma or Illustrator as a PNG.
Save yourself some render time and transfer anything complex that can be animated with layer transform.
Whoa I want this right now!!
You are in luck friend. As quick as you can swipe that internet money card for the amount of $75.00 USD, this power can be yours yours.
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Mandatory Twig
