• Adobe After Effects

  Animating an eletricians floor plan

  Posted by Martin Eriksen on July 17, 2012 at 3:06 pm

  Hey Creative Cows out there! I’m doing a “simple” animation for a TV Show. It’s about an electrician, and they want the floor plans of a floor animated to a dummy voice saying “First we’ll isolate the walls, but up two walls and some doors”. ANd they want the whole thing animated.

  I got the PDF of the floor plan, I separeted the individual layers in Illustrator and brought it into After Effects. But it’s like 70 layers for THIS ( https://cl.ly/image/012h1T351E0E ) little sketch, and they’re planning to give me more of them over the following winter.

  So I need a smooth and stable way of generating the animations necessary for approx. 25-50 different animations. Does anyone have ideas? I’ve been thinking of the Stroke-effect, but that will take hours, and I am paid for like 2 hours for each animation, so I wouldn’t like to go over my schedule as I’m a film student and have a busy schedule in school as well.

  Thanks in advance!
  Martin

  Martin Eriksen replied 14 years ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Dan Fredley

  July 17, 2012 at 5:11 pm

  One way is to copy and paste the illustrator paths as masks onto a solid. (I would suggest setting the AICB preference to “Preserve Paths.”) Use redefinery’s “MasksToShapes.jsx” script to convert them all to shapes. Apply a white stroke. Then apply a trim paths animator and change “Trim Multiple Shapes” to “Individually.” This might not be exactly what you want, but it’ll get you to a good starting point. Then you can reorder the paths and group them into sections as needed.
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  Martin Eriksen

  July 18, 2012 at 6:25 pm

  I found a way after about an hour googling through options. But you had a few tricks up your sleeve I havven’t tried out, so I will!

  Thank you very much, Dan!

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