How to import and animate KML routes with After Effects and Google Earth Studio

in this video I'm going to show you how to create a three-dimensional route path using Google Earth studio and Adobe After Effects starting off in your web browser go to google.com slash my maps and create a new map if you don't have access to the my maps section of Google you'll need to create a Google account we're going to use this tool to create a KML file which contains the information for a particular route in this example we're going to go from the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles to the Santa Monica Pier what we've done is we've entered in the information on a particular layer and now we're going to export that data as a KML file a KMZ file or Zed file is basically just a zipped version of a KML file now we're going to jump over to Google Earth studio and enter in a new project we're going to import that KML file that we created into the project which will give us the various place markers for reference in addition to the actual route itself so we're going to go to overlays and then import KML and I'm going to import this from my drive selected the file that we created and it loaded the two place markers of the Staples Center and Santa Monica Pier as well as the route itself which is shown here as a blue line when the overlay window is open you can double click on any of the items on the list there and it will take you directly to them as I did here I'm just now going to position my camera for the initial shot I'll speed up and slow down the recording as I set up the keyframes here I'll be following the path of the route so that get good angles of the route and the surrounding area these are just my initial keyframes I'll be going back and scrubbing through the the project to make any final adjustments or smoothing where needed and then down here will be the final closing shot for the video someone's gonna scrub back and make some fine tuning adjustments with regards to some speed now making some tilt adjustments so that there's some fluidity in the up-and-down motion as well as trying to get that ferris wheel in the shot throughout I can also do some panning adjustments as well in the graph view you can make adjustments to the handles for the keyframes and this will control the in out as well as the amount of easing between the keyframes so I'll just fiddle here with these adjustments here for just a moment and things look pretty good there so now let's add the experimental feature which is the roll this is going to give us a bit of an airplane effect as we Bank corners and that looks pretty good there so about time to save and now we're just going to add the time of day feature which gives us a little bit more of a realistic look but also allows us to control sort of where the shadows are and give us a little bit of that golden sky at sunset okay so I'll just go back and review what we've done here we've got a couple adjustments that's gonna make a bit of a fix on this curve here in the map view a little bit softer around the corner there okay so now that we've got that pretty much playing the way that we want the final video to be presented we'll go in and add a few elements which is going to make it a little bit easier for us to overlay the KML file here in a moment which is actually done in after-effects so although we did import the KML file into Earth studio we will not be using that in the actual render itself because it's fairly flat and fairly limited with regards to what you can do with it in the overlay window double click on the route this will Center the route in the screen as well as providing a true north at the top of the screen set a keyframe here do the same for the staple center double click on it and then find a position where you're going to be able to see a little bit of the route as well as the actual Staples Center and then we'll do one more for the pier which is our final location these three key frames will not be used in the actual video itself but will be used to help construct the KML file that we'll be bringing in to after-effects and our finish point here we'll just remove the curve on the final location of the pier as it will have curved into our top overhead shot of the actual route as you're probably aware you cannot import a KML file into After Effects a KML file uses a latitude and longitude to indicate locations and coordinates whereas After Effects uses a pseudo Universal transverse Mercator file or coordinate system to indicated coordinates in its world space so we'll be converting the KML file data into an SG V file that can be used in After Effects and overlay into our After Effects project we will however add a couple of track points we can use these track points within after-effects to create animated place marks you'll also help us align our path or route so once we got those set up we will now go into our overlay and hide it so as to not show it in our render and we will just have a pure image render so we'll set this up make sure our advanced settings include the JavaScript file and we'll click start so I'll just fast-forward through here and here we see it just finishing up this is the output video from Google Earth studio so we'll save that to our computer and now jump into our folder view and extract the contents of the zip file that was provided ok and now we'll switch over to After Effects and we're gonna go file scripts and run script file and we will select that file from the zip folder and it will load up the world coordinate system and camera I always delete the text elements that are provided in this file and we'll just scrub through that video and have a look make sure it's all there of course it is and we're just going to go to the frame where we get the top-down view of the route area we're going to jump over into Google and do a search for kml to SVG and there's this one website called gps visualizer which will do the conversion for us you select the file then we will also select the SVG format and get that created now this is a free service so I would recommend if you are using it that you do use the donate button and make sure that the provider of this service can keep it up and running and so we now have that file saved now to get the path into After Effects we're just going to jump into Illustrator and open up the SVG file does have some information in there that we don't need so we're just going to select that path that line there make it copy of it or cut it and just paste it onto a blank worksheet now the way that these files are constructed are there lines connected to lines so we want to join them all so we'll select all of the elements there and join them and this will create one large line and now we can just copy that file back into After Effects we're going to create a new shape layer we're going to just draw a shape with the pen tool and then in the contents of that drawing we're going to go to the path select the path and now paste or ctrl V for Windows users and now we've replaced that path with our path from illustrator so this is how we get the SVG into the actual file we're gonna switch it into 3d mode and select the staple center as our target zero out some items here so we can leave the X&Y and will or whichever coordinate the left and right and we'll zero out the altitude zero out our rotation and now we're just going to increase the size and move it closely to between the two points and you can barely see them there but they're indicated by the place markers there with the little red boxes so we'll zoom it to size and because everything was north when we double clicked on the overlay within Google Earth studio and the file that is created in this SVG format is north we don't have to do any rotation we can just size and position the path itself so this takes a little bit of fine-tuning but you can scrub through the video where we have those ooh in tracks our frames and make some adjustments so we can see how it overlays moved things around a little bit until it lines up with the streets and this takes a little bit of fine-tuning but it can be done within a minute or two and so that side looks fairly good man we'll check the other end so we're to scrub through and we're off a little bit so let's make a bit of an adjustment here just scale it a little bit and make the adjustment left and right and back to our end point see how things look there and look pretty good sometimes you get it and sometimes it takes you a good five minutes or so but now you can see we have the overlay of the paths on the road system and we can pretty much manipulate it whichever way we want so in this particular case was to clean it up a little bit and then we'll provide some animation to it as well so I'm just increasing or decreasing the altitude there just to bring it a little bit closer to the road now the Google Earth system obviously has altitudes and the curvature of the earth built in whereas this is a flat path that's laying over top so you will see slight differences in altitude it won't ever cross into the path because the images underneath are not three-dimensional they're just rendered as three-dimensional but you will see when we get to the pier area that there is an increase or in the altitude or appearance of an increase in the altitude of the path it's actually a decrease of the earth into the ocean so now we'll click add and trim paths this gives us control over the line and how much to animate the portion of the line that we want to display so we're sitting our start 100% and this will obviously depend on which direction you're going so you just play with the start and end points to see where you're going to have none of the line showing or all of the line showing so for this we set our point at the start at 100% and then at the end at zero for our starts so you can see how the line draws it cell starts to draw itself out but it's going quite a bit quicker than we want it so we can set some key frames now in between to slow down the speed of the line as it draws in to synchronize more with the video or camera angle so we will just make a few adjustments along the way now I can get a little bit tricky to see the line as you can see here with the the path markers and the actual line underneath the path markers themselves will hide the line so sometimes it helps just to sort of click off the path element so you can see the line go back make an adjustment click off so you can see where the adjustments being made to and there we go near to the end and so we'll just give that a bit of a review there make sure everything's staying in frame and that's that's okay and so now we can add a little bit more dimension to it by giving it a bit of a drop shadow select the drop shadow effect and drag it on there find a good place where we can see it and give it a bit of an adjustment there we go that's pretty much ready to render out now just to add a little bit of a different effect this would be sort of more of a traditional map display I'd suppose but if we wanted to go a little bit more high-tech this is Los Angeles of course so we'll add some glitz I'm just making a copy of the shape layer and we'll apply a different effect to that so first we're going to change the size and color of our lines and make it a little bit more narrower and give it a bit of a white blue hue and then we will change our shadow to give it a bit of a glow so we'll add a few more shadows in here that will glow the color of blue to give it a blue glowing light effect and one never seems to be enough so we'll add another one in there and that's looking pretty close it's fine turn it just a little bit thin the line a little bit more there it looks a little bit nicer maybe somewhere in between there and just tweaking a little bit here okay good so we'll see how that appears now now we are using a bit of a thinner line so it might get lost and some of the distant shots he looks a little bit thinner there sort of give you a bit of a Tron retro look there as well so we kind of lose the line there so let's some keyframe the width of the line will start getting a little bit smaller and then get a little bit thicker as the camera moves away and then as we get back into the zooming in we'll make it back to thin again there you go that looks pretty good and so for whatever your project is whether it be creating travel videos like I do or creating some other project I hope you find this tutorial useful if you have any questions please leave a comment we do review them regularly as always if you like this video please give us a like or subscribe to our Channel and we'll see you soon thanks for watching

Channel: Imagiscope Travel & Tech

Views: 139,361

Rating: 4.9581838 out of 5

Keywords: after effects tutorial, google earth studio, google earth, google earth studio tutorial, after effects, google earth in adobe after effects, google earth studio after effects, how to use google earth studio, google earth studio video, google earth studio demo, how to create map animations, how to animate travel map, google earth animation video, import google earth to after effects, kml, kml in after effects

Id: XxnssN5HGCI

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 16 2019