Limits and things to know

The limits, defaults and behaviours that surprise users most, in one place.

• Caps. 4,000 paths in a vector layer (a street class over it goes to the plate); a warning past 250,000 vertices in a comp; an image at most 8192 px a side (After Effects' footage limit: a raster map stays sharp only so far, and the notes say so); at most 256 tiles a view (the profile's budget is lower: 48, 64 or 144).
• What moves with a keyframed Root depends on the map kind (Map kinds: World or City, raster or vector, live or still). The usual surprises: a raster globe does not spin; a vector Mercator map is still unless Live map was ticked; Robinson and the other projections never move (bake them), and their pins, arcs and labels stay put even when the map is baked; terrain, imagery and day/night are baked for the view they saw (render them again, or they become sequences under a keyframed Root).
• Update map is needed after any animation that looks past the map's edge, zooms past its sharpness, or moves a still map; the bar above the status line says when. It cannot fix a camera looking past the horizon (tilt less), a pull-back past twice the comp's width, or a projection with no live form.
• Rebuilding. Changing centre, scale, projection or tilt is a rebuild; changing colours is Apply Style. A rebuild keeps and refits pins, labels, arcs, areas, boundary and data layers, re-renders backdrops for the new view, and re-imports files; street routes and street, river and contour names are made for one view and are removed with a note.
• Offline. World maps never need the network. Street maps fetch each tile once, then read the cache (a region file makes them fully offline). Terrain, contours, elevation bands, imagery, Natural Earth themes and rasters, open data and online place search need the network the first time; offline, terrain-derived layers are skipped with a note and street detail stays Natural Earth.
• Attribution. A comp holding OpenStreetMap-derived layers (street maps, street detail, OSM imports) must credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors": Atlas adds the locked ATLAS Attribution layer by itself (Settings → Attribution). Imagery, terrain and credited data join it. Two sources ask for a fuller credit in the piece's credits or description: the AWS Terrain Tiles and NASA GIBS (the third-party notices hold the text).
• Speed. Every open comp viewer tab slows Atlas's steps: close spare viewers before a big build. A camera makes every map layer 3D (about half the playback rate of a big vector street map). A live globe renders at about one frame a second. A raster map plays at footage speed.
• Undo. Each Atlas MCP tool and each panel button is undoable in After Effects. In 1.0.1 a map build is followed by a few small steps of its own (the camera view, the attribution, the texture, the finish), so undoing a whole build can take several Undos. The Style tab's edits have their own Undo and Redo buttons.
• Language. From 1.0.1 Atlas's expressions read every slider by its position, not its English name, so pins, labels, arcs and live maps work in After Effects running in any language. A comp built with 1.0.0 in another language shows expression errors until the first Atlas action in it (a pin, a build, Apply Style), which repairs them. In Atlas's number fields type decimals with a full stop (0.5): a comma is not read.
• Particles need the Atlas Particles plug-in on every machine that renders them, or a bake (Data → Particles → Bake to PNG sequence).
• Fonts. Styles name a font family; a machine without it falls back silently.
• Not in Atlas 1.0.1: 3D terrain models and extruded buildings, a spinning raster globe, writing shapefiles, labels drawn into raster zoom levels, OpenStreetMap places through Overpass (paused).