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individual (automated??) ‘transform each’ inside a shape layer’s different groups.
I have a AI file of a fish composed entirely of dots. Hundreds. When I transform it to a shape layer I then want every dot to scale up from 0%, from each dot’s centre, NOT from the entire fish’s centre. Basically what “transform each” does in AI. Is there anyway of doing it without having to apply a transform to each and every group inside the shape layer itself, maybe expressions or a plug-in or another method? I did a map of australia last week manually and it nearly drove me insane*. And that was only 50 groups.
The only other way I can think of is to initially make each dot a separate layer in illustrator, which would be a headache but would still be better than the manual method inside AE.
* the reason for insanity is that when you copy/paste attributes from each group within a shape, there’s a chance it will replace that group’s path with the one you copy/pasted the attributes from. I haven’t 100% figured out the rhyme or reason for this
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4 Replies
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Where do you get “groups” from? If I paste a piece of illustrator artwork on a shape layer, I get masks.
With masks you can animate the mask expansion. Doesn’t work exactly the same as scaling everything from 0 (expect if all the masks are the same size).
You can draw the fish on a Shape layer with Ellipses and you can scale them all individually around their respective center points (or linked to a central scale slider).
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I thought I was being quite specific about the groups INSIDE a shape layer, after importing AI file and converting shape to vector. As i said the illustrator file has hundreds of circles, if i do what i said each one will be inside its own group inside shape layer>contents>group1, 2, 3, etc
dodgy workaround I thought of this morning was just keyframing the stroke of the entire contents (they’ll be either on white or a solid background) going from 100 to 0 using the BG colour as the stroke colour. Surely there must be a better way than that. Frustrating that illustrator has the ‘transform each’ function but not AE.
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Rick Gerard (bless his soul) on the adobe forums suggested Simple Choker which when keyframed works a treat!! For anyone who stumbles across this post with the same problem.
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Ok, I see that you get groups when you convert it that way.
Each group has its own transform settings, so if you put a slider control on a separate layer “controls” and then use
temp = thisComp.layer("controls").effect("Slider Control")("Slider");
[temp, temp]for the group transform>scale, that’ll do it.
Of course, you’ll still have to paste it to each group transform separately.
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