How to Turn Illustrator Designs into Motion Masterpieces

have you ever wanted to take your awesome illustrator designs and add a little bit of motion to it well today we're gonna pull some disney princess magic and bring these inanimate objects to life my name is imani larussa i'm a two-time emmy award-winning motion graphics artist and director i predominantly make music visuals for artists like kanye west big sean lolanos x and more so i'm always making illustrations or i'm hiring illustrators to design the visuals for these scenes so today i'm going to be showing you some tips and tricks on how i turn illustrator designs into really cool animations and after effects in this video you will learn how to analyze and break down a scene to really bring your animation to the next level converting illustrator files into easy editable layers and some do's and don'ts that i've learned before we begin make sure you download the project files in the description below so you can follow along this tutorial is going to be extremely helpful if you're an illustrator that is looking to animate your designs or if you're collaborating with another illustrator's designs so let's hop right into step one for me this is the most important step when creating an animation that many times is overlooked i'm a very visual learner so i always get a pen and paper to just jot down my ideas and how i plan to execute the animation from the design that was created so the big thing here is learning how to analyze your scene to make it really pop and cohesive this super awesome amazing illustration was created by kevin kh kim i've worked with him so many times and he's absolutely a phenomenal worker and he was gracious enough to provide us this illustration as an example so if you guys end up using this illustration definitely tag him he's super awesome and he deserves all the flowers he could get my first initial idea when looking at this character is maybe giving him a thumbs up so i'm gonna write down on my paper robot gives thumbs up but now that i have that down what does that mean for the scene if a robot gives the thumbs up then that must mean that his arm moves and if his arm moves then his shoulder must move and if his shoulder moves then this little character on the shoulder would move too the goal here is to really break down the movement understanding the cause and effect before you even start animating there's so many elements to this that could really take this design to the next level but if we aren't connecting the motions together it's really not going to look like a cohesive piece once i have my character animation written down i also want to break down the environment i think environment and animations are so underrated and i've seen so many pieces that could have been taken to the next level had the environment been as beautiful flowing as the character animation for me it's super important to have this written down on a piece of paper because one i won't forget what i'm doing and two i have a game plan so i could start coming up with a reasonable timeline for how long it's going to take to animate and this is super important especially when you're working with clients they always need to know how long it's gonna take step two importing your design into after effects to animate so i wanna show you two different ways one that's a process that's just within after effects and the second one which is a really cool plugin that i purchase and use regularly first let's make sure that when you're in illustrator all your files are organized this is going to be extremely important for when you're bringing in the files to after effects and thanks to kevin all of these files are compressed so i'm just going to save this illustrator file so that we can import it into after effects so next we're going to import the file by going to file import file go to the school of motion tutorial folder and your illustration will be in the illustrator folder and we're going to import this in as a composition instead of the footage because we want to have the layers separated and not merged together in one piece hit okay and now when we click in this composition the way that our format is laid out is the same way that we separated and compressed the files in illustrator so i'm just going to organize and put these where they need to be so to really get the full experience of animating these illustrator files we want to convert these over to shape layers so we have more control of the animations first i want to go in and label all of these so i'm going to right click on one of these layers go down to create and create shapes from vector layer and as you can see there's now two files that are labeled guys center and robot we have our original illustrator file and now we have the shape layer file typically i just delete the illustrator file and now when i go inside the contents all of the assets are separated in its own group i had mentioned before that your illustrator layers should be organized and kind of put within its own layer because you will now have the ability to highlight all of the paths and animate them at the same time because they're on the same layer so if you had different layers for each individual asset so say i had this character's hair and hat and they were all on separate layers then i wouldn't be able to highlight all of the paths and animate them at the same time i would be able to use the transform settings but i wouldn't be able to animate the paths on all of these different layers so now i'm just going to convert the rest of these over to shape layers and here's where the fun part happens we need to go in and label all of our layers i already took the liberty to label all the files for you but when you are working on your own designs it's super important to make sure that you label all your groups in your shape layers so next i'm going to show you another great tool and it's created by battle ax so this plugin is called overlord and it allows you to import shape layers with just a click of a button i don't want to spend too much time going super in depth into this plugin but if you got the money to spin it's definitely worth it [Music] these rules aren't written in stone but they've helped me and i think they'll help you too so with our first one don't ever expand or compound your strokes in the illustrator let me show you exactly what i mean so say we're in illustrator and we have this black stroke and we want this red pattern to go inside of the stroke so because it's a stroke in illustrator you're not able to use the shape builder tool or the pathfinder tool because technically no fills that are being registered for the pathfinder to cut out or the shape builder to cut out so if we were just designing an illustrator and not looking to animate it you would just expand these and make it a fill and take it out with one of these tools but if you decide to do this in illustrator and you bring it into after effects to animate you run into something a little funky by turning this stroke into a fill we lose a lot of options under the shape layer it now makes it incredibly more difficult to change the path of this fill than it would be to change it as a stroke something as simple as just changing the size of this box makes it difficult when it's not a stroke so let's bring this back into illustrator and try it as a stroke now instead of using the destructive tool of expanding or compounding we could just separate these layers and put a set mat on them or an alpha track mat so that i still have my pattern in my black stroke but now i can use all the tools in the shape layer like the taper and the stroke width going this route is just going to make a quicker workflow and you have new room for possibilities of what you could create which leads us into our do part of this segment do expect to recreate assets in after effects so with this piece i'll show you an example of what i'm talking about so i have this character sitting in the chest of this robot and i want his arm to move the steering wheel but as you can see in the design the arms are separated which means it's going to be a lot more difficult to animate these paths if i don't change it so i'll show you exactly how i recreated it so i grabbed my pen tool and i created a stroke to make his arm i made sure to label the file correctly so i don't get confused i change the line cap to round and then i change the color of the stroke to match his skin then i animated the path of this stroke to make it look like his arm was moving to turn the steering wheel and because in the original graphic his shirt is covering his arm i made sure to put the arm stroke underneath the shirt next i needed to make his arm look like it was inside the machine like the original design so i found the shape layer where this pink panel reside i copied it and i pasted it in the shape layer where character is and just put the pink panel above all of these layers and to save myself from any confusion in the future i'm going to parent this path to the original where this pink panel lives so no matter how much i change this path on the original shape layer it's always going to follow it and just like before if we move his arm then we need to connect everything else so if his arm moves then so does his shirt and also his hand moving steering wheel and for this design everything has a stroke on it and because we're already using a stroke we can't put a stroke on top of a stroke so what i do is i just duplicate the original arm make sure to parent it to the original and make the stroke width bigger add a little bit of easy ease and there you go and for another don't don't forget to make sure that your strokes are all consistent i've seen this in many designs where a designer goes to add a highlight or shadow and some of the stroke is cut off this also can happen when using blending modes in illustrator and importing them into after effects so if you run into this issue this is how you solve it here i just imported my star from illustrator but when i converted it to a shape layer the stroke is now cut off to fix this i'll go into my contents duplicate the original shape and put it above all of the groups that i want the stroke to cover i'll turn off the fill then i'll parent the duplicate to the original i can't tell you how many times i've needed this but i couldn't figure it out so now that i know i want to show you all so you don't have to go through the headache that i went through and whenever i do that i just like to put don't edit on top of it just so it's a reminder to not touch that one and lastly do have fun motion design is problem solving and keyframing and rendering but it's also art and creation so even though you run into your own unique problems each time it's really fun and you gain the knowledge for the project next which makes your workflow that much easier and that's it i hope this was super helpful for you guys if you have any questions at all definitely feel free to contact me and don't forget to subscribe for more tutorials on motion design and visual effects and make sure to click on that bell icon so you get notified for any future videos thanks so much guys you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 217,295

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: GfLDJnPOWoE

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021