Working with the Essential Graphics panel and Templater can be a bit daunting at first, as it’s a very unique workflow. Let me see if I can describe how we might set up a project in the way you described, and hopefully, that will be enough to get things moving in the right direction.
For this example, I’m going to refer to our main AE comp as “Main Project”. The first thing we’ll want to do is locate the properties we want to adjust and drag them into the Essential Graphics Panel. For this example, let’s say we have an image layer named “picture”. We’ll want to open the Transform section of the properties and drag the “Scale” and “Position” properties into the EGP.
Once we’ve got those properties in our EGP window, we’ll want to rename them to something that’s easy to reference in our Google Sheet. For now, let’s rename “Image Scale” to just “scale” and “Image Position” to “position”.
From there, let’s create a new comp in AE and edit it so that the name is surrounded with double curly braces, like {{Comp1}}. The double curly braces will instruct Templater that this will be the default comp to process when it comes time to export. After that, we’ll want to drag our “Main Project” comp into the {{Comp1}} comp and rename it. For this example, I’m going to rename this comp to “assembly” (with no quotes).
After that, we’ll want to drag the Templater Settings Effect onto our “assembly” comp so that Templater knows which EGP settings to adjust. We can verify that everything is set up correctly by opening the “assembly” comp and confirming that we have both the Templater Settings Effect and an Essential Properties section that contains our scale and position values.
Now, we’ll want to head over to our Google Sheet to add the columns to control the data. The names should be formatted like this: layername@[property name]. So, for this example, we’ll want to add a column for our scale property: assembly@[scale], and one for our position property: assembly@[position].
Once that’s done, we’ll need to populate those columns with values. However, if we take a look at the scale and position values in our project, we’ll see that they both contain two values, separated by a comma. That means that the value for those properties is an array, and that will need to be reflected in our data source. So, for example, in our assembly@[position] column, we’ll need to add something like this: [100,100]. That should instruct Templater to set the value for the position EGP property to 100,100. This is a bit counterintuitive when it comes to the scale property, but since AE adjusts the horizontal and vertical scale with two different, matching values, we’ll still need an array for that property as well.
Finally, we should be able to preview the {{Comp1}} project and see the results reflected in the Essential Properties values. As a quick side note, this won’t affect the linked properties in the “Main Project” comp, only in the “assembly” precomp in {{Comp1}}.
Hopefully, that all makes sense, but if you have any questions, you can let us know here or get in touch with us directly at support@dataclay.com.
Happy Rendering!
