Adobe Illustrator to After Effects - Getting Started with Logo Animation

hello my internet friends my name is John Jegs knee into today we're going to be talking about how to bring an illustrator file into After Effects in the most efficient way possible for logo animation or say some Instagram templates or whatever it is so without further ado let's go into this computer machine and talk about how to take illustrator files pretty much so to prepare a logo for some logo animation you're gonna start an illustrator and the first thing you'll probably get from a client or a friend or a graphic designer is a branding guide or the logo in vector form so this is whale bird kombucha designed by my very good friend mr. Dan Adolph and we're gonna take one of his logos from Illustrator and bring it into After Effects to do that the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna copy one of these logos so we'll just select this guy right here make a box around that ctrl C to copy it were to file new and then you'll see I have this 4k preset right here basically you need to make a composition that is going to match the dimensions of what you're working with an after effect so I'm gonna be animating a 4k logo animation so that will be a 3840 by 2160 artboard I'll just double click that preset and then ctrl shift D to get rid of the transparency grid it's still there but just makes it a little bit easier to work with control V to copy that logo and we'll see it's right there it's very small I don't know why illustrator does this but we're just gonna make sure we have the selection tool selected big box around that hold shift and then drag that logo out Center that up maybe make it just a little bit bigger and we can see on the artboard how big our competition somewhere in the center okay so now that we have this we can see it's on one layer and then what we need to do now is convert this into many many layers so that we can play with layers in after-effects so to do that let's release everything will conceive oh my god there's a lot of stuff here so to convert everything to layers first we see all these paths here we just need to make sure we select the top layer the master layer click on a little far right here and that will select everything click on the three lines in the upper right hand corner and make sure we click on side or at least two layers sequence and very conveniently that sets all the paths that we had and everything in here in two layers so now what we can do is we can take the first layer layer two in the stack and then go all the way down to the bottom and then just bring it out so for After Effects what you need to do is make sure that we make sure that every single layer that you're gonna be working with is on its own layer otherwise you'll have to dig through a bunch of us mini layers and Inter layers and after-effects and it just takes more time so after I do this step then what we need to do is name all your layers because that is a good practice to do so we could go through this entire stack and just basically poke the little eye out to see to see where all the layers are so this is bachelor just double click that batch and just go right down the line I'm not gonna make you watch that I already did that so we're just gonna open that really quick LM s4k name blares hey there it is and what I did here is you'll see that there's actually less layers here and the reason why I did that is I condensed some of the things that I know I didn't need to work with so I have the individual teeth in separate layers if I wanted to do something with the teeth and after effects I brought out the whale texture so that's the sort of the white path where the the whale lives like the main part of it and then I have the eye here we can find that we have little bits of the eye if we wanted to animate just the little element right there all right there that little dot you get the idea I have all these parts of the logo separated so then now I can basically control everything I want to in after-effects now we're not gonna do a full logo animation tutorial with this because otherwise this would take very very long going over how to animate paths and shapes and the puppet tool I'm gonna show you how to bring this into After Effects now all you have to do is just hit the import button and afterwards but before you do that let's go back to the original composition that we were working with just to demonstrate the last thing I forgot to mention make sure you save this so this is the willboard logo for Kay and I'll just add a little note at the end of that okay so now that is saved we have all these layers here let's go back to the 4k named layers just so that we don't need to waste time with everything there all we need to do now is go into After Effects and we see I have this blank composition here what we're gonna do is we're going to select the folder where we want the assets to live so I'll typically put all my vector files and elements so you can see I already did that for the logo animation that I showed earlier but what we're gonna do is import that once again so we'll hit ctrl I once we have the vector folder selected and then those are my photos of some halo thing that will bird elements for K named layers so we could select the tutorial one if we want but it would literally do the same exact thing so let's just go with the named layers and we're gonna make sure we have the import kind set to composition and the footage dimensions set to layer size and that will retain the dimensions of each layers of let's say if you have it the the whale shape for example it will retain the whale shape it won't make the shape as big as the composition it'll stick with whatever the size of the path is so click OK and we can see we have a composition here and then we have a folder where all the vector files will live all named accordingly and if we go into this new composition that was just made we can see hey there's the logo that's super convenient it's already in after-effects with all the named layers now there's one small problem with this and that is the fact that your illustrator file is still retained in after-effects which is if you think it's a good thing but if you were to try and scale this up say hypothetically make a null object to control this which is just a tool in after-effects that controls data so we'll select all of those layers and link it to the null so then this null will control the actual full logo we can move it around by itself we can scale it up but here's the problem with the vector file format in after-effects it does not rasterize them which means it will retain the dimensions and the resolution of it so what we're gonna do is we will select all of those layers the illustrator layers and after effects we're gonna right click create and create shapes from vector layer and that will create shape layers in After Effects now we did get this error box here and I knew that was going to happen because it is not recognizing the text as layers so we can click OK and we can see all these new layers were selected and created but there's a handful of Illustrator layers that are still there still with the I there while the ones that were created into shape layers had to I poked out we don't see them anymore because we're now using shape layers what After Effects in Illustrator did is it recognized the text versus the actual paths so we know unfortunately that the text in illustrators actual text files but that's not the worst thing in the world and here's why because it's actual text and not past we can just copy and paste that in After Effects so if we go to the very top we double click our text tool and we'll see we have some empty text what is call this place holder or now and now we have some placeholder text and if we just solo that and turn off the transparent some good there's some text now if we go back to the illustrator file we can select the text layer well bird hit T make sure we have at the text tool selected control a copy and then go back to After Effects double click that control V and it will still retain whatever character properties exist in illustrator and bring them over to After Effects now we can see it is left-aligned so we'll just center align that just because I like working 2 center-aligned and then we will Center that anchor anchor point ctrl alt shift home and then we will unsolo that we can see we have text that is identical to the whale bird text we just drag that likes so make sure you're snapping is on right in place snapping is up there by the way sometimes it might be off so you can use the arrow keys to nudge it into that perfect spot and you can go all the way down to the whale bird illustrator vector logo part delete that and hey look the text is there now we could do that for every single one but very conveniently once again what I did is I did all of this stuff already in the sample we can see the logo animation sample I have the text layers already built out and I have this very simple logo animation of the whale bird logo and the reason why I show you this even though you don't need to know this for this part of the tutorial of just learning how to bring something into After Effects is that if you're a graphic designer and illustrator and you're working with a motion designer it would be very beneficial to help them out a little bit and break everything up into layers or name your layers so that when they actually have to go to the animation stage they're not trying to rebuild everything from scratch now what the after effects animators should know how to do is once those they know what they want to do with the animation they'll manipulate the pass but you can also do fancy things to help them out as well but that's it that's how you bring illustrator files into After Effects and make them usable for motion designers I know we covered a lot but the main thing I want you to remember is separate your layers in adobe illustrator name your layers so that motion designers and after effects users can just hit the import button and get started with rebuilding that logo in the most efficient way without having to like break up all those layers and figure out what the project structure is that's it I hope you learned something if you did let me know in the comment section down below I think we're up to 240 subscribers now one little fun fact I actually don't know if you subscribe if you have you subscriber information hidden or subscription information hidden so if you would like a shout out and you do subscribe to me let me know in Instagram DMS out contact me and I'd be more than happy to give you a shout out I didn't get any new emails but we're up to think 240 now so thank you very much my new friends I appreciate you joining the channel and all of that fun stuff until next time my name is John Jackson II eat your protein one gram per pound of bodyweight imma go make some protein lunch probably some chicken and potato and whatever and enjoy that I hope you enjoy your day goodbye my friends stay safe stay healthy during volkova nineteen stuff bye [Music]

Channel: Jon Jags Nee

Views: 24,326

Keywords: Sony, Sony a9, Video, Cinematography, videography, after effects, premiere, tutorial, jags, illustrator, adobe, after, effect, logo, animation, vector, file, workflow, work, flow, animate, shape, layer, glitch

Id: 6sSstXlSpm4

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020