MotoMarkers
Free script to manage comp markers in After Effects
In some After Effects scenarios, you're working in a composition with a lot moments or segments that have their own loop or part that you'll want to re-use. For example, a character rig comp that has multiple walk cycles (slow, fast, sneaky), jumps and other poses or moves that may be occur multiple times in an animation. Your comp timeline becomes so long (over 5 minutes), that you lose overview of what's where and you have to note or remember the part where your character does that certain move. And then to use that segment of your righ / comp in the main animation, is fiddling with IN and OUT points that can become a real headache! MotoMarkers is made to solve these issues. Based on working with comp markers, it creates an overview of what's where. It makes your life easier to find, play and use your walks, poses and loops. Watch the tutorial for more details. Place this script in the "ScriptUI Panels" folder within your After Effects applications scripts folder, for example in:
/Applications/Adobe After Effects 2020/Scripts/ScriptUI Panels/

Download

The script can be downloaded here for free.

Background story

A few years back we we're working on a big project where we had to produce 16 animations that contained multiple characters with lots of poses: walks, jumps, turns, facial expressions and so on. All to be produced inside After Effects, with Rubberhose and some custom controls for each rig. An episode could have dozens of these poses for each character to use and re-use, so we had to find a way to organize all these poses. After some testing, I decided that using markers in AE would be a good way to 'administrate' each move, pose, or walk, and working with loops would be an efficient strategy. The problem however with this, is that a character (having its own rig in its own comp) will have a very long timeline with many many keyframes and IN / OUT points for each walk / pose cycle loop. Navigating through the timeline to find that moment where you made that jump or sneaky walk can become time consuming and frustrating. So how do you organize all those poses for each character and get an overview of what's where? Is that walk cycle already made? Do we need to have a variation on that? That's how this little tool was born.