From the course: After Effects Guru: Mastering the Timeline

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Changing the stacking order for a layer

Changing the stacking order for a layer - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Guru: Mastering the Timeline

Changing the stacking order for a layer

- As you design with several layers, it might be become necessary to change the stacking order. Now, if you work in 3D space, this is less of an issue. It'll be the Z position that determines what's on top and what's further behind. But if you're dealing with 2D layers, well, this becomes more important. Let's take a look here at our switches and modes. And we'll scroll down here to some of the background layers. I'm going to turn on the white layer here so you see it for a moment. And what we want to do is change the stacking order. What we can do is simply drag the layers above or below each other. And that works fine, but we can also do that with a keyboard shortcut. If I use the keyboard shortcut, of Control + Alt + up and down arrow on a PC, or Option on a Mac. If you just hold down Control, and you use the up or down arrow, it will change which layer is selected. So, I can select something, for example, and then add the Alt or Option key and nudge it down. Notice that these…

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