Illustrator paths not lining up as motion paths in AE! Please put me out of my misery...
by FlowMotion
on
May 23, 2007 at 1:37:01 pm
I've been working 80+ hours on this graduation animation. It's for a training DVD that is supposed to show the specific paths of travel for everyone involved throughout the ceremony. The animation will be 7 minutes long when complete. I thought it was going to take me 40 hours to complete! (insert psychotic sleep deprived laughter here) I have had some success in animating 2d vector graduates around in 3D space and multiplying the grads with Trapcode Echospace. I built all the imagery in Illustrator, including all the vector paths of travel which I have been converting to motion (position) paths in AE. You can see a sample here:
However, due to time constraints (more psychotic laughter) I decided to do a good chunk of the animation as purely 2D. (Think birdseye view of the stadium floor with color coded dots following respective paths.) Everything seems to go well until I paste the vector paths from Illustrator into the Position data for my animated dot (graduate) in After Effects. The path shows up in its entirety and on the correct 2D plane, but it is scaled much larger than the image it should be matched to. See it here: (The path should match one of the yellow strokes)
Re: Illustrator paths not lining up as motion paths in AE! Please put me out of my misery... by Flowmotion on May 23, 2007 at 6:53:05 pm
Sounds good. I know how to draw a mask, but how do I draw a motion path, other than actually hand animating the object? I was hoping to use my Illustrator paths because they are already drawn and there are a lot of them. It's actually not for the graduates, it's for the marshals that have to route the graduates.
Re: Illustrator paths not lining up as motion paths in AE! Please put me out of my misery... by Dave LaRonde on May 23, 2007 at 7:30:31 pm
You could copy your Illustrator paths to a mask on a solid in AE, then use the Free Transform Points command to coax the path into something that will work. Once they're right, you could create a motion path.
Re: Illustrator paths not lining up as motion paths in AE! Please put me out of my misery... by Flowmotion on May 23, 2007 at 7:38:25 pm
I can bring the Illustrator paths in as masks and they match up perfectly, but as soon as I try to paste the mask to an object's position layer it gets resized.
Re: Illustrator paths not lining up as motion paths in AE! Please put me out of my misery... by Dave LaRonde on May 23, 2007 at 7:56:01 pm
[Flowmotion]"I can bring the Illustrator paths in as masks and they match up perfectly"
Yeah, but what are they matching up perfectly to: that picture of the football field? From that screen grab of yours, it didn't look so. Make a solid the same size as that football field pic, and paste the illustrator path onto it and see what happens. Then use the free transform to get it looking right again. From there, you should be good to go.
Re: Illustrator paths not lining up as motion paths in AE! Please put me out of my misery... by Flowmotion on May 23, 2007 at 8:02:43 pm
That screen grab shows the screwed up motion path, not the mask. The mask is perfectly aligned until I try to make it a motion path. I'll give your suggestion a try though. I'm willing to try anything at this point.
Re: Illustrator paths not lining up as motion paths in AE! Please put me out of my misery... by Dave LaRonde on May 23, 2007 at 8:37:53 pm
Yeah, I thought it might have been something like that.
I'm no illustrator genius, but I know that Illustrator layers are only as big as they need to be to enclose the object or path. After effects layers are any size, and when you paste paths onto them, they can be waaay off... but free transform can fix them. Or else you have to figure out how to make an ae solid that's the same size as the path layer.
So If your football field is an illustrator layer, and you paste the illustrator path onto a solid that's the same saize as the field, the path will be way off, but you can fix it and use it.
Re: Illustrator paths not lining up as motion paths in AE! Please put me out of my misery... by FlowMotion on May 24, 2007 at 1:35:57 am
Thanks Dave! You are a genius... quit being so modest. I ended up pasting my paths directly to the football field layer, adjusting the alignment and then copying and pasting those corrected masks to my animation objects. It worked! I haven't slept in three days, but I feel pretty good. Thanks again! Now I can get this thing finished...
