Lessons

Lesson Info

Converting Illustrator Files to Shapes

So we're going to be getting into, uh, looking at how vector images work. Vector layers from illustrator. Um, I've got a just go right into aftereffects it import and illustrator file and show you what happens. So, um, import file and I'm going out to my desktop and day to because this is day two and I can bring in either. I've got an E. P s file and I've got an illustrator file. I could select either one of these, too, and they would work in here. So I'm just gonna open up the illustrator file. And if I create a new composition, it was called that good. Yes. It gives me the little warning about you're going into this workspace. So let me see here, going to just drop this in, and we can see that the logo is just in there. It's got this kind of funny, jagged edge in here. Um, we can choose to They see they moved this on me. My continuous rest arise due to do. Uh, I see here where it went, there is a continuous rast arise, but that used to be right down in here. And I'm trying to remembe...

r where got moved to in C. C. But it allows you to, um it allows you to Teoh continually take this vector image and clean up the edges. And so, unfortunately, is not. There were not going to staying in this mode long at all, because I'm going to convert this to a shape layer. I like to do that because right now it's just it's treating it like it would be like a ping file. The background is transparent. So if I change my composition settings to whites, did a black see here? Then? Of course, that's what How we're used to looking at the Adobe Theodore B logo. So what I'm going to do is convert this to a shape layer and thats done quite simply by right. Clicking on the layer and select create shapes from vector layer. That's this guy right here. So if I do that, what this has done is actually made a duplicate of my logo layer noticed that I've got an outline. A shape outline layer appear now. My original logo layer is down here, but it has been, uh, turned invisible. So now the visibility is off on that logo So now I've got an actual shape layer here. So this is converted that to vector shape layer that I can scale I can manipulate. I can edit over time. Um, I made kind of destroy the adobe logo here. So forgive me, Adobe, for distorting your your logo. We'll see that we've got several loops. Are groups here that are parts of the layer. So, just like if you were in Illustrator, you may have different layers of different parts of your groups inside there, and each one is a path. So because we have pads on all these, just like we studied the, um all of the masks and pen tool yesterday. We've got paths that we can manipulate here over time. And because we got a stopwatch there, we've got a key frame. So if I came out to one second, I could grab one of these handles. They're just select one, and I could just move it around so I could actually come in and you distort the logo, makesem shapes or whatever to it. Um, I could do that with each and every item on here. I'm going to leave the text by itself. I want to just distort the red guys. Here we go. Going here path, go back to zero because I'm actually going to move these over time. Here's give you that and grab a point so you can see you can do some some crazy things to locate this. It may make a good reveal for a logo to actually work backwards of what I'm doing right now. Um, probably what I should have done here. We can always copy key frames and move them. We might do that. So that could take this one and distort as well. All right, so what I can also do is play with the order of these groups and move that up on the scroll up. Here we go. Those on top Because we are still in two D here, the layers on top will have take precedent, so that will cover up the other stuff. So what I'm a do here is to release down, grab these first key frames a little fast, and I may just move them down here. Then I can select all of them again and bring them back. Okay, So what I can do there is kind of reveal what's going on with that logo, so Well, I may do is find my paths with my other group items here. Close those up and see here. We've got group six, which is just a d d o. Since those are and then e Okay, So, groups to through six going to troll this open. And if I can do it this way, so good, it's going to let me do that. Some of these letters have two paths in them because there's an inside and an outside stroke. So I just have to open these up. Actually, all the letters do, don't they? Every single letter and Adobe has two paths. There's inside inside strokes to him. So I just have to click my stopwatch on every path. And I worked my way through this again. We're watching paint dry air. Okay. Okay. So we've got all of those selected. We've got our first, our final key frames, and in this case, I, um, going to just move them so great. My paths, see if I can select all of these here. If I can select it by the group, That might help. Since I've already created my key frames. I can now shift and select all my group's. Actually, if I go all the way up since I'm shift selecting, I can go to group to it. Should select everything in between. Yep. There you go. That's faster. And I'm just going to move them. Uh, globally. Oh, no, no, no. It de selected. All right, We'll try to select him again and grab them all. Here we go. And see if I could just Okay, let's do that. Wow. Let's go. Something crazy? There we go. So anyway, the whole idea is to make it not look like the adobe logo. Oh, and it didn't. It didn't key frame for me. Why did it not do that? Um, let me see if I can. Uh huh. I may have done something. It was a transformed function instead of up command Z. There we go. Uh, let's see if we can do this. It's dead now. It's not letting me globally grab things for some reason. So with more than one object, So I don't want to make you sit here and watch me grab a whole bunch of points all over the place. Um, there's the danger of just grabbing stuff on the screen. You grab something that belongs to another layer, and you've messed it up. So whole idea is to make it not look like the adobe logo before we start. I think I've succeeded in that. There we go. So we just don't reveal So you can see that by converting a vector layer, which is either an E p s or a illustrator file, you can convert it to a shape layer, and then you can take all the points in that shape layer and animate them, animate their points over time. Quickly. Brand preview there. That's one way, one of many ways that you can edit your shapes. Now there is ah, shape, um, preset. And I think we may have touched on it just briefly yesterday. Uh, let me go over to my presets panel here, and if I go to my browser, I wanna browse my presets. Bridge is launching. There we go. Okay, so now I can come up here to shapes, and then we've got different elements that are shaped elements that air preset elements. See if this actually shows up, there we go. And that's a shape animation. If I select that, it should just add it to my timeline. E did not do that. So let me go up here to new layer shape layer. Then we'll go back to that preset and see if it will add it to that. So go out to bridge. Had that. There we go. Now that animation is in there renders out, and that's a preset animation. So what you can do is ago. How did they do that? And you come in here and you find out you can look at the groups and see how that there see how they're built, how they're animated. And these look like the groups themselves are done through an effect so animated shape control so you can reverse engineer stuff just by looking at some of the different shapes. Lett's Let's look at another animation type here with shapes that's Go Teoh, a new shape layer and looking another type of preset. Let's go back here. Shapes and animated sprites. These are pretty wild here. Well, Spira, graph action there. Mandela. Grab that one. This one's already animated. It's well, since we've got the effects in here that would tell me. That's probably where our animation is contained in this one. I don't easy shapes much because again, I am pixel painter. I'm not vector painter, so I don't do vectors that often. So typically, I'll take something that somebody else is either animated for me or I will convert them to pixels, which is going to be my next. My next exercise, actually, is to show you how I deal with animations and animating characters and animating graphics. And then we start bringing them into three D in controlling them that way. So I tend to work in a more more of the real world are simulated real world where everything to me is like it's being shot in a studio or on a camera or in, you know, some kind of a three dimensional environment. So that's kind of where my mind thinks I'm not as much into the two d vector based things. So not going to spend a lot of time here in this area. So with that being said, let me close this project up and, um, get into one that lets close bridge to I want to show you where you can find some of that stuff to work with. Now here's a project that I built I wanted to animate a logo for ah, fictitious coffee shop. So I got an illustration off from Istock photo again. I'm gonna open this with Illustrator and this was the original graphic that I got. Okay, it's kind of a little retro look to it there. And I wanted to animate the coffee cup in the steam and everything all separately, But I wanted to get rid of this hideous background. So get rid of that in that In that, then the backgrounds gone. Okay, so what I had to do here is you'll see that a lot of times artwork that's created an illustrator has a ton of little tiny pieces in it. So if I was to try to bring this into after effects, as it is, it be kind of a hot mess because he would have every little stroke could be in there, and I have to control every little thing and group and subgroup and all of that to try to make something usable. So what I like to do is separate out all of my elements by looking to see what? What is combined here? So I see these two here are combined. And, um, I can make a, uh, make another group. Let's see here what's inside? That's just one path that's got one path. So I kind of combined things so that they make sense so I can combine. I think they kind of make little groups that way. So I know that's one element in that steam, and I know that I can make that one group, and then what I end up doing is going down the line and finding Okay, where are all the parts that go together? And that's all part of a cup. And that's part of a couple. Of course. This one, luckily, is labeled well, typically, when I get a project from a client that says we want to animate our logo, we want to animate this scene. We want to animate, you know, slide or something. They'll give me an illustrator file that has no labels. That's totally a mess. You could have the the pupil of an eye on somebody's face is way down at the bottom, where there's, you know, the rest of their I somewhere else and their eyebrows in another area, and it's all just like layer 7 35 or whatever, and you have to go in and Hunt and Hunt and Hunt. And so this is the first thing I do when I'm given an illustrator file is to organize all of my content that is usable. So So this is like the brim of the coffee cup. I would have to combine all of these together and group them so that they would make sense. Luckily, I've already done that. Don't say if and going into here and here's my logo here now it's just telling me there's a font missing because I used ah, font that I bought somewhere else, and I didn't want to install it on here. So when you get this project on your downloads, when you buy the course, this font will be missing. So you have to replace it with something else, not a big deal. It's just a font that I used for my original demo in its down here at the bottom. And right now I think it's replaced with whatever I should have. In hindsight, what I should have done is converted it to an outline after I made the logo and then we wouldn't have an issue. So if anything, there's a lesson to be learned here. Outline your fonts that you don't have that issue when they handed off to somebody else or you open it on another machine. So there's a little lesson to be learned there. But luckily I had already, uh, rendered out what? I need it here. So if we look here how I've organized this whole thing, I've got steam in one group here so I can turn that on and off. I actually created ah, couple new little drops, the coffee spilling out of the cup because I wanted to animate those kind of going through out the coffee in the cup. You can see it's got its own group as well. So that's another thing, because originally I was going to animate the coffee kind of sloshing in the cup while I animate the cup in. So, uh, in hindsight, didn't need to do that, But sometimes you just don't know. The cup you can see is made up with a lot of different things here. Every little, you know, bit that's in There is all part of the cup. So I organize those altogether. The saucer, the same thing. It's got a lot of elements under it, and that's it's cup and saucer coffee drops and steam. So now I've broken down, you know, 50 or so elements I've brought them into define herbal layers that I can now utilize. So instead of again instead of trying to bring these in as groups have subgroups with all these different things and trying to do shapes and factors and blah, blah, blah, say, Screw that I'm going to go to the pixel world. So I take one element at a time so we could start with the saucer and then I just come over here to file and then export, and I save it as a ping file. And then, of course, I say what it iss and like this one, I would call it a saucer whips, except I would spell it correctly saucer dot PNG And when I go to export, then it gives me this screen now typically, um, 72 d p I or P p. I pixels per inch is what will use for final resolution in video, but because I want the option of having the ability to either zoom or you scale or whatever. I always go for 300. So I like to work is much easier to go higher rez and scale down than it is to go the other way. Especially when we start working with three D layers and we want to start zooming in on things or have things flying in three D space. We really wanna have enough resolution where we're not Casey Jaggi edges or data loss or any kind of really bad compression. Another reason why use Ping is because it gives this transparency of you'll notice here. Transparent background is our background color here. Always select that, because that's going to give us our transparency around the edges of whatever layer were sending out. So if I click OK, then we've got that saucer out there, and we can bring that in as a a zey PNG layer into after effects in. That works really, really well. So I go down the list and I do that with every element that I need to. You know, the coffee's got its own thing because I'm not even moving it. I don't need to extend it. I don't need to make it fit inside the cup, because I'm actually combining it. Um, the drips are on their own layer the steams on its own layer. And I treat each one a little bit differently in each instance here. So let's quit illustrator and don't save. And then let's open up the aftereffects project. Okay, so you can see here that I've got pull things together here since a little tighter. I've just got a few layers in here to make this work. I've also got some sounds. We're gonna cover that in a second, too. So we're still working in two D here. But I do have, um this little background in here. So instead of just being, uh, you know, a plain white background, I added a actually made it a blue background and added it white with an inverse mask on a very feathered edged mask in there. And I'm not animating that mascot all. It's just got 100 and 50 pixel feather on it, and I got it from add to subtract by default. Masks are ad so I could have it either way either add or subtract. I wanted the white to go out to the white that the page that it was going on. So this kind of graphic is good for using on a website or in a video or whatever, But this will show you how I've animated all these pieces in again. Staying in, um, staying in the space. I move this in. See, I've got the saucer coming in first with the cup. Let me pull out these other layers. So we're just looking at one at a time. Here we go. So I got the saucer flying in and what I've done is I've rotated slightly. Let's look at all my key frames here. That's important. That tells our story key frames Tell the story. So you see what I've done here? I've got it moving in from this point, so the animation doesn't really start until about, you know, frame 20. Then it comes flying in course, I got motion Blur added to the layer, and then I've got my rotation going. And on this key frame, if we look at it, uh, it has It's actually a key frame interpellation in here. It's auto busier and the way to make it do that and why you do that in auto busy, a curve is to to not make it jar. It's not easy in, in or out, so we're not easing anything. We're just making it. Have a general curve, and, uh, you can do that by command, clicking on the the key frame command, click or if you're on a PC control click and you'll notice that it goes from a diamond shape to a round shape. In that round shape tells you that's an auto busy a a key frame, and that just allows it to have a smooth transition over that. I didn't want it to be obvious that it was rotating at that point. I just wanted to keep on keeping on, and we see that rotates again there, and what I've done is in my position here. I've got it coming to an extreme point here, where it's going past the point of center, where I want it to rest. That gives me that little bit of a jarring, um, kind of ah, again, it's another characterization, almost like cartooning effect, where it kind of goes a little bit farther buying and then comes back like it's got been attached to a rubber band, and then it rests here and again. When you put all the pieces together, you'll see that they kind of makes sense. Then now the same thing was done with the coffee cup. Let's take a look at that again. I've made all my key frames match here because I need everything to follow along. So the coffee Cup does almost the opposite is faras rotation. It's kind of flying in from a little higher altitude or vertical space, and it comes in and it kind of kind of meets the saucer about this point and bounces back into position here. So it does this little bit of ah rip in there. So we've got that motion going on there again. The coffee I first played with it, having it slosh in the cup, and I realized that because of motion blur and everything, it just wasn't showing up. So I just had it conformed to the cup. And how did I do that? I have no key frames on their Why don't I need key frames on there because I'm copying on mimicking exactly what the Cup is doing so I have parented the coffee to the cup. So when that comes flying in now, actually L d selected so that you can see it. There we go. So I'm scrubbing through here and I see the cup in the coffee are moving at the same time. The motion blur pretty much takes care of everything, especially as fast as it's all moving. So when you see the full animation, you'll see it moves. It comes in really quick from like that. Okay, so now the drips do move independently and see their path, and we'll also see that they don't even fly on because the drips shouldn't be flying on. They just start when the cup kind of jostles there and it bounces, bounces back. They kind of drip out of the cup and just landed there. So I got a little easy on on both of those. I've got my opacity set down here where there's Thea Pass. Idiots just coming up the drips come out okay. And then the steam I was thinking about oh, using a mask and you're making it, um, you're making it rise or doing something clever with steam. But the test that I did playing with it, just really distracted from the rest of the animation. So I let the steam just fade on. So it's just coming in with opacity setting there. So that just kind of fades on steam. Kind of does that. Watching the fog roll in to San Francisco every day has just been insane. It just boggles my mind. I live out in the North East Bay so we don't get fog out there much at all were on the other side of it all, but I was thinking, Wow, it's such a beautiful day. Perfectly clear blue sky in about four o'clock and maybe we'll go on a photo walk. I'm able to do something and then I just start seeing it coming in and the tops of the buildings start disappearing in within 1/2 an hour. It was like, Wow, it's just all fogged in. It just appears out of nowhere. Just is just so wild to be here in the summer, um, to watch that weather change so much. So steam kind of does that, too. It just kind of creeps up on you unless there's got a physical source now you'll see here that I've got the correct logo because I had already rendered out my PNG file from my master. So my PNG has the text as a is a pixel pixelated graphic with transparency, and I've got it coming down and it bounces down and then up like it's kind of on a a string or a rubber band. It bounces around a little bit and then settles just as the steam finishes. Okay again, All of this stuff is subjective. When you are animating things, you want to add character to them. You add bounces. Do you add some exaggeration? You exaggerate all the moves, and that's the most important thing about animation is selling it. You're selling the idea you're selling, um, what each element has to offer. What does it contribute to the story? What does it contribute to the full design? And when you're doing that, then you can really have an understanding for its. Let me turn the audio off here and just do a a ram preview quick so you can see what this just looks like. It's a very quick, clean animation. It's over in two seconds. Uh, it's great for an I D or just an intro. This is typical of, like Company I DS or Film Studio I DS, where they'll just have something really quick at the end of their production or at the end of a show or the beginning of something. Oh, are on the Web. They may have something where something animates on quick when you first go to their page, but it's just a quick little quick little logo I D. But there's enough there that, um, kind of tells the story. You know, that's coffee. That's no doubt about that. That's coffee. It's not baked beans. It's not re fried beans. It's not any other kind of beans. Could be hot cocoa, I guess. If you're in the hot, hot chocolate. Ah, I didn't think about that. Could be cocoa beans are cooked cow beans. Um, so anyway, I've got a couple things here. I've got two different, um, two different sounds that I got from a sound library. One is kind of coffee shop sound, the other ones the slosh of the coffee coming out of the cup. So let's so it's just it's actually some sloshing and water, but sometimes it's disaffected to be exaggerating, you know? So I was trying other things. They weren't enough again. Sometimes going overboard cells the idea a little better. And most people aren't going to be looping something like that. They're gonna hear it, see it once and then gone. You know, that's a way. So again, if you exaggerate all of those elements than it will have more impact, and that's typically what you would see, so it would just go and then stop. And that's the end of it. So it has an effect. It reinforces the animation, and that's where sound is really, really useful really helpful to us here.