Illustrator to After Effects: The Field Manual Part 1

[Music] hey guys this is Amy from school of motion and today I'm going to be taking you through how to get your illustrator assets into After Effects as a motion designer this stuff is super important because you're going to be doing it all the time I'm going to show you a bunch of tips and tricks so you can avoid some pitfalls and not get stuck midway through a project also scroll to the bottom of this page and sign up to be a VIP member because we're always giving out bonus content with this lesson you'll get a PDF so that you don't have to go back through the whole video just to remember something really quickly thanks for watching let's get started all right guys let's get started with this tutorial so I would like to apologize for my keyboard it is the loudest keyboard on earth I will eventually replace it sooner rather than later so we'll only have to deal with this for maybe the first two tutorials that I do alright so we were provided with this wonderful artwork by my buddy John Kraft he put it together and we have our three boards here these are each different art boards now we've got our different objects kind of separated out into groups over here and I want to mention that this is actually an EPS file now we're starting with an EPS file just so that we can see how After Effects handles those particular types of files the short of it is After Effects really doesn't handle those types of files well at all so we are going to import this EPS file ctrl I to bring up this dialog and you hit import and we're going to comp that really quick and as you can see this is not what we want at all our artboards are all just kind of spaced out I mean it brought it in pretty much exactly as it was laid out in after federalists Reiter not what we want we have no layers down here we can't isolate these objects and the color space is actually wrong on this too so we're going to go back into illustrator and we're going to fix this now the first thing that we want to do is actually make it an illustrator file and that's just as simple as going up and hitting file save as and then just selecting Adobe Illustrator we're going to take off our EPS suffix here and you can just leave these default settings either completely fine to bring into After Effects now the other thing we need to address is that this is in CMYK and that's why the colors aren't showing up correctly now this was a pretty easy fix also now it's not under color settings like you think it would be so this just brings up the profiles for Adobe instead it is actually under file and then document color mode and there's RGB color always takes me a little bit of thinking to make it through some of these menus alright so now we've taken cover of the color space and the actual file type so let's save this and won't bring it back into After Effects and see what we get this time delete out these EPS files all right import coffee shop and we're going to actually talk about the different ways to import things too so for this first one we're going to import it as footage import and we're going to leave it as footage and we're going to leave it on merge layers and hit OK now as you can see it brought in something a little bit different this time but it's still not what we want now what's going on here is After Effects just kind of picks an artboard I feel like it's arbitrary there's probably some science to this but it won't actually look at the artboards that are in the project file it's just kind of going to pick one and that's the art that you're going to see and this is all you're going to get now when it's brought in as footage it's doing what it's supposed to as far as it being footage you're going to get just one thing everything's gonna be merged down together that's completely normal so we actually need to go back into illustrator and we need to get rid of those artboards now the easiest way to do that is we're going to be doing some files save as work here so what we'll do I always save as first because otherwise I get myself into big trouble go save as coffee-shop seeing one and same thing default and we're actually just going to delete scenes two and three out of here and you're going to select your artboard tool and you're just going to close these artboards down you can also select them and hit delete either way works just fine so now we just have seen one isolated out on to into one file and then we're going to do the tedious thing where you open it up again and we're going to go file and save as coffee shop that's going to be seen to whoops so we repeat the process for all three scenes all right so right now we're just going to focus pretty much solely on scene one this is going to give us very good demonstration of what After Effects actually does when you bring in footage the three different ways that you can import it so the first thing that we're going to do after effects only looks at the topmost layer the topmost layer in your illustrator files what I mean by that is this is the topmost layer and if we added another one here layer four would also be a topmost layer these little sub layers or subgroups are not going to be looked at by After Effects because they're nested underneath the top layer so what we're going to do right now is we're going to come in and we're actually going to separate all this stuff out we're going to assume that you probably logically would want to animate the speech bubbles separately the girls separately the guys separately and then have the background kind of hanging out as a background like it should be so what we're going to do here is we are going to go in as a reason I'm clicking off and we are going to use release two layers but if you notice is grayed out right now I don't know if I'm the only person who is unaccounted this problem I feel like I've ran into it on multiple computers I don't know why this happens but I found a workaround for it all you have to do is add another layer I don't know why this works but it does I am NOT the genius who will explain the why I'll give you the workaround though and look magically release two layers is back as an option so we hit release two layers sequence and magically everything is in its own layer now well not really magic but you kind of get what I mean so we're just going to drag all of these out and we're going to leave the background and seen one layer right now and we can dump this empty layer off of here you're also going to want to name things this kills me all the time when I get a file and it's not named prop really so I'm going to go through and rename all of these really quickly alright so we've gone through and we've renamed all of our layers properly so that way we know what we're working with when we get into After Effects you notice that move dialog box pop-up that's because I have one of those hotkey kind of things that happens when you work in more than one piece of software in Illustrator it is not enter to rename a layer it is just double clicking on it whereas in After Effects double clicking is going to get you nothing and you actually have to enter so that's why that happened all right so we're going to save out our file and let's check out the different ways that After Effects handles these import processes all right so here we are back in After Effects and now I'm going to show you the three different ways that you can get a file from Illustrator into After Effects and the ways the After Effects is going to handle each of these import options so the first option which we've already kind of touched on with the EPS file is important put egde that one's a pretty easy one we have to comp it really quick so you can see what happened here all it did was bring in one flattened layer so all that setup that we actually just did an illustrator is not preserved it's going to flatten everything back down into just a solid layer now you could go through and create shapes for vector layer and then go through all of the stuff and separate it out but that would make you a crazy person and I would highly recommend that you don't do things that way takes a lot of time and also you notice this gray shape back here like the background broke we'll get to that but that is something that does happen when you bring in illustrator art certain things will break I promise will come back all right so we'll delete that one we're going to import again import scene one this time we're going to import it as a composition when we hit the import this time it already like made a comp for us so we're going open that up and if you notice this time it actually did preserve our layers that we set up back in Illustrator which is pretty cool the downside to using composition is that every single one of your layers is going to be the size of the comp which makes it really hard to grab things and it would make this file very cumbersome after a certain point to animate so really this can work but it's not ideal so the best way to get your artwork into after-effects from illustrator is to do composition retain layer sizes now this one makes it count for you again and our layers are all here but the difference is you saw when I highlighted it every one of these it looks at the actual size dimensions of each layer and gives you this nice bounding box it makes it way easier to grab things and your anchor points slightly more centered you'll probably still have to tweak it depending on what you're doing but this is way more manageable already the other thing that you're going to notice is that if we bring our lady up she's cut off at the bottom now that is just how After Effects brings singing things in from illustrator when you select this particular option it does the same thing when you select composition and there is a way to get that information back in so don't freak out if you see something cut off it just takes a little bit more work to get it back so the way that we fix this bring her up so you can see here and we're going to convert this create shapes from vector layer and we're halfway there you notice she's still cut off right at this line very there is actually an artifact from the importing like when from the conversion I guess you say and what's happening is it's keeping that artboard in there as kind of this bogus dummy pass so what you're going to want to do is find that artboard pass and then delete it out now the way to do that is literally just turn things on and off until you figure it out and you see on path to here this is the path that we want because our oh there we go so that's turning on and off and you can see that shape filling back in so delete that path now if you notice we still have a hole here that's because that thing is going to be on anything that was cut off so you're going to have to find a couple of them in here and delete them out pretty simple but still it could get really tedious if you actually have a lot of artwork that's been cut like that so I wanted to show you guys this handy script called explode shape layers it's been hanging out here at the top and there's a reason it's been hanging out up here this thing is I think like 35 bucks but man is it awesome we are not being sponsored by these people this is just a great solid tool if you're doing a lot of this work you are going to want to get this thing so we have our lady already done I'll show you how to do this on the guy really quick so what you're going to want to do is you hit this same button you know converts it to a shape layer and then we can actually go in oh I hit the speech bubble see this is silly we want the guy there he is man all right convert him he's converted move them up there we go and then there's a button here and this button is amazing because it takes out the artboards for you and we're all done two clicks easy peasy all right I'm gonna move him back down now so the next thing that I want to show you guys is what if we didn't break this artwork up enough when we were back in Illustrator there's a way to get around that and it has to do with all of those groups that we were looking at down here so let's say we wanted to actually isolate her ponytail to animate what you would want to do is again kind of turn things on and off figure out which one's the ponytail I've done this before so I know is group 8 at the very bottom it will kind of do the layer stacking order so if you know that that's gonna be the back most object you can figure out roughly where it will be in that position there so we're going to take group 8 we're going to delete the or not delete we're going to duplicate the lady first then we're going to delete Group 8 so if we solo it we just have her head now on this layer and then on this layer we're going to do the opposite we're going to grab everything except for layer 8 delete that and now we have just her ponytail isolated then we can just drop that layer back below there and we are all set to move this thing around well almost all set is the anchor points going to be off on it which is just as easy as going into pan behind dragging the anchor point to where you want it and the ponytail is ready to go now I'm going to show you again how to do this but I'm going to actually use explode shape layers this is kind of a little bit of a quicker way to do this because again you're not going to have to be fiddling around with turning things well I guess you will have to turn things on and off again it's a little bit different we'll just show you it's easier that way all right convert it to a shave layer this time we're going to explode the shapes out so instead of having to turn eyeballs on and off I keep hitting these speech bubbles that's just how this is going to go tonight alright convert it explode it there we go remove the artboard check that out now we're getting somewhere you can actually solo these now so there's a speech bubble so we can pick through and instantly solo objects until we figure out exactly which one it is that we want so everything is isolated onto its own shape layer now but we can actually go back in and if we want all of these pieces together we can merge them back together so these are all merged and we're going to get rid of these excess layers now we don't need these and then we have our pony tail separated so it's just a slightly different way of doing things and it can be quicker just because you have that option of soloing instead of switching things on and off and trying to figure it out that way one more thing that I am going to mention before we move on to our second file that we saved out scene two is that if you notice After Effects is kind enough to just leave everything there for you and so is the explode shape layers it can get a bit messy but as you've seen if you kind of just convert the wrong thing it's nice to know that it's still there for you you can delete them out when you're done you can leave them there whatever you choose you could shy those layers doesn't matter but it is kind of a nice safety that they hang around for you all right so now we're going to move into file - all right so in the second file what we're going to do is if we don't want to do all of this work kind of re prepping our file over here in After Effects is we're going to actually prep it in Illustrator and kind of think ahead and plan what would it be that we want to animate so we are going to abandon scene 1 and open up hope I've seen two already open perfect so here's scene 2 we're still just on one board right now and we're going to do that thing where we release the layers into a sequence so now everything is ready to be brought out of that one layer this is the tedious part dragging everything out one by one alright and layer three up here is a guide layer we don't need this anymore so we're just going to completely get rid of that so now we need to think ahead like what parts of these people would we want to animate and how do we want to separate them out well we've already decided that we want the girls ponytail to be separate so what we're going to do is create a new layer and we're just going to bring that ponytail in there there we go caught it that time and bring it back into its proper place beneath there so now this will be its own separate layer and after effects we're going to want to do the same thing for any other shapes that we want isolated so any faces if we want the head to move independently from the neck the arms to move the knees to bend at a joint whatever it is we're going to go through and separate it now all right so I'm going to do the arm the arm we're going to do our hand with no we'll do the hand separate just in case and then we want to do the face now when you're going to pick up shapes like this and they're grouped together you're going to want to use the group selection tool I actually have this hot key set up myself this is not normally a hot key I'm just using shift a for my group selection tool because I do use this quite a bit and it makes it faster for me to have it set up that way so we want all of these things together if your hair together so this whole head part is going to be together and then what we can do to make this a bit quicker than just dragging each shape on ctrl or command G to group it then drag it into its own layer so now we have arm we have a hand and we have the girl's head clearly the girl's head is out of order so we'll throw it back underneath so that's all we're going to separate for her and we'll do the same thing over here for the guy now now he's actually drawn a bit different I want to point that out really quick if you wanted this arm to be together you put it on the same layer not you know this could be a joint that you could actually animate in After Effects I also want to mention if you set an anchor point up like a rotate anchor point for example this won't carry over oh boy this is a bug in CC 2014 I can confirm this has happened to me on more than one computer I don't know if this is PC or Mac specific but it freaks out and Anchor Point is getting stuck and it won't come off it's the most annoying thing on earth I should mention if any of you out here out there who are watching this have an explanation as to why it's been doing that since the CC 2014 update I will be super excited because I just don't understand why that happens right now alright so if you did successfully move your anchor point over there after effects isn't going to carry that data over you're still going to have to hit the pan behind and set up that anchor point in after-effects it don't bother with any of that stuff over here just leave that stuff for when you get into the after-effects side of things so I'm going to go in and group this guy off really quick same thing we did with the lady so this will speed up a bit for you all right so now he's all kind of grouped up he's got his arm I actually might want to pull it arm shadow over now that I'm thinking about it that would be something where you might end up redrawing this as another shape to get it to move with this arm or you might mask this in after-effects somehow you'd have to use some amount of creativity to get that to move properly with the arm if you animated it the way it's drawn in here but we'll throw it in there just in case we want that and we can always explode that layer later if you needed to all right so we have these pretty well set up now you're going to go in and you're going to name everything properly so that you don't confuse yourself or so that you do like I often do apparently all right now everything's renamed properly we save the file command s save early save often the file saved this things ready to go back into After Effects ok so now we're back in After Effects let's import our second scene scene 2 we're going to do composition retain layer sizes again and we'll give it a second to think about things and there we go everything that we split up all of our layer names are here in After Effects ready for us to animate now I wanted to mention that goopy thing that we saw earlier where the background broke when we converted it so if we go in and create shapes from vector layer again you'll notice two things happened the first one that I didn't mention before is After Effects will actually jump that layer to the top which can be kind of annoying but you just drag it back down to where the other thing is After Effects does not import gradients from illustrator it will not preserve them so you're going to have to redo any gradients that you have in After Effects whether you're using a ramp or you're using that gradient option that's actually underneath the shape layers here gradient fill I personally prefer the ramp so that's just me though I'm going to get rid of that though because there's not really a reason for me to keep that I just want to show you guys those do breaks so plan ahead either plan to recreate that when you're back in After Effects or just leave those as the illustrator portions of this so the other thing that I didn't really mention before might be a little bit weird to demonstrate in this file but it's very very important just zoom up to there let's take her coffee and I'm going to move it out of her hand I'm going to scale it up really really really big now the whole point of bringing something in from illustrator not just because you want a nice vector art is because it will actually scale infinitely and keep redrawing that path so why does this look like crap right now it's because we actually have to tell After Effects so we want this to be continuously rasterized which is the same switches collapsed transformation so you'll notice as soon as I hit that little button there everything goes back to exactly how it should look so it doesn't automatically turn that on when you bring something in from illustrator so you're going to have to tell it on each of these layers to continuously rasterize if you plan on making something scaled up larger than 100% when it comes from illustrator well we can just control Z alright so let's just turn all of our switches back on why not there we go so that's all taken care of now the stuff will scale forever and ever you can zoom it as close as you want you won't get crunchy looking edges the next thing that I want to mention is if you have something really complex going on path lies and you try to convert it into a shape layer so almost blackboard if we look in Illustrator this is actually created by using the brush tool in Illustrator so all these are just these tiny little paths you can see them here there's kind of this scratchy look to give it a little bit more of a chalkboard type feel now when we go into After Effects and actually try to convert something that complex into a shape layer we're going to use explode shape layers because I can and we're going to sit here and we're going to watch this now because I've done this before I know what's going to happen and I'm only going to let it go so far before I turn it down and we're going to hit skip so you can see it did something we only got partway through but you know what the heck is going on here After Effects is free cleanup out right now that's because if you look under contents check out all those groups holy crap there is nothing you can do with that this is excessive there are 500 paths here and this thing wasn't even close to done so don't do that if it's something super super complex again plan ahead leave that as a actual illustrator object don't try and convert it to a shape because it will have a meltdown on you I think I let it run a little bit longer in one of my tests and it took mmm it was a few minutes and it got to like 2,000 paths it was something scary like that so again don't do it basically back here and after Illustrator I wanted to show you guys kind of what After Effects is actually doing with these paths if you go under so we have this selected we're going to go under object expand appearance and this is exactly probably okay exact approximation I don't know I can't say exactly I'm not that qualified but I can tell you this is what After Effects appears to be doing it is actually converting all this stuff into just points like this you could see how that text was just glowing in After Effects that's because when you convert to a shape layer essentially what it's doing is something like an expand appearance so that's a good way to figure out if something's overly complicated for After Effects if you're really not sure and on the fence about it expand the appearance and if it glows like this leave it alone all right so the next thing that we're actually going to cover we're kinda in the homestretch here I know this is a lot of information to take in so we're this is why this turned into a two-parter is going to be typed from illustrator now we already set up our seam file over here seam three or get some coffee I lied we have two more things to cover but that's alright so we're going to do that same thing where we're going to blast all these out into their sequence layers alright so now we have our background and we have all of this with a blend shape which is something new we haven't talked about and then we have our type and this type right here is just standard like you can come in still edit this regular old type in Illustrator oh dear I'm just going to control see that so it looks like I turn something there we're going to save this and we're going to come in and do scene three now so same thing composition retain layer sizes nothing new there open this up now I know some of you may know this but from Photoshop you can create shapes from text or create mat masks from text you saw that that was a type pass it was fully editable but from illustrator we can't get that same editing capability that we had in Photoshop I don't know why this is something people want but this is the world that we live in we don't have that and I didn't name my stuff this time I'm going to go in and fix that because I'm driving myself crazy that's our blend shape and that's my background there we go well we missed an arc we're going to leave it that way though so the only thing you can oh and this gets even more fun actually you go to create shapes from vector layer on something that was not this is a regular editable type layer from Illustrator you get an error it is empty or unsupported content there's another one of those quirks that we kind of have to deal with alright I'm going to save this let me go back over to illustrator now the reason this is happening is because After Effects really just doesn't like type from illustrator at all you're actually going to have to create outlines if you want to make these into shape layers to be animated so the hotkey for that is would be command any second command shift o or control shift o well outline your type you can also find that under type create outlines I know the hotkey so I don't really go up there much and now you know the hotkey too so you don't have to go up there anymore either alright so we're going to save this and when we go back into After Effects it automatically updates now when you outline the type it moves this it's probably just measuring this differently now than it was previously so that's why we're getting that offset so you're just kind of going to have to move it back into place and then it was nudged just slightly over so is it easy enough fix there's no need to go in and reload and tire things all right so that's taken care of now if we want to make that text a shape it'll work easy enough now the other thing that I want to talk about really quick is going to be what happens if you forgot a layer this is super important you don't want to forget things so let's say we needed another layer in this file and we will just make will make another text layer that didn't work out it's according to plan right now we really need our coffee right now that we do there's our text ads on layer three as it chooses we have a right now and this typeface well we outlined our type that was code bold yes it was I remembered what typeface I used code bold and because I'm a stickler for this kind of stuff I am going to Kern this just a bit I'm pressing alt and the arrow keys to Kern the type that's kind of a quick hot key trick that will make you a lot faster what you do instead of having to go down to that character palette I remember when I learned that I was very happy that day okay that's improved much better it's improved so we want our coffee right now we're going to make it white we're not going to put the blend shape behind it this is just for demonstration purposes only and we're going to throw this on a new layer and we're going to save it and we're going to go back after effect and it reloaded you saw it reload but nothing came in and that's because it's like Photoshop if you add a layer is not coming in with it if you save the file it just completely disregards it so you would actually have to go in and do and even if you come up here and you go in and you can't reload the footage nor is it one Scene three pardon me yeah even if you reload the footage manually up here it's still not going to bring that in you can try anything you want you're going to want to import your file scene three composition retained layer sizes import that guy and there it is there's our type so we can actually go into the scene for and we can pull that type out later six and we can copy and paste it into the new one and that's it so now it's there so what that's essentially what you'll have to do is you'll have to real import the file and either pull that layer out or you could always just pull all that stuff out and illustrator re-save the file bring the new file in that's the only way you're getting a new layer in here alright so the last thing that I want to quickly mention I promise this one will actually be really quick is that blend shape that we saw earlier so if we go in and we convert this to a shape layer we see that dialog box popping back up again and that's a bad sign because it's thinking way too hard about what it's doing right now so we're going to hit skip and just not even let it go and you can see this is kind of glowing up here and that's because it just made a ton of paths this is kind of a completely impractical thing once again don't convert complex blend shapes over into into shapes layers in after-effects these bad things will happen plan ahead for that one too hey guys thanks so much for watching this tutorial I hope you learned a ton of stuff if you liked it please go and share it on Facebook Twitter wherever it is that you lurk on the internet and I will see you in part two you [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 48,787

Keywords: motion graphics, tutorial, After Effects, Illustrator, Adobe, Workflow, process, files, ai

Id: k7uCJ7jrhs0

Length: 41min 1sec (2461 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2017